2 Totalitarian Propaganda

Section E. Propaganda as Instrument of Power

I.

If totalitarian propaganda must change the psycho-physical structure of people in order to lend some appeal to the facades it glorifies, in so doing it need not rely exclusively on terror. The psycho-physical structure can already be found in a changed form, which is suited to the needs of propaganda, wherever Germans appear not as individuals but as a mass. Thus, the second means that totalitarian propaganda uses to pursue its aims is the exploitation of the particular constitution of Germans who form a mass, and the ongoing production of masses for this aim.

As sure as it is that all masses demonstrate certain common characteristics—the concept of masses is used here to designate large gatherings of people—not all masses are constituted in the same way. In addition to masses of sundry persons fortuitously thrown together, there exist others that consist of individuals from one and the same population stratum. Speaking generally, the most politically important homogenous mass is the proletariat, which has recently been joined by the masses of salaried employees {Angestellten} and the proletarianized middle classes more broadly. The proletariat should also be called a mass even if its members do not form a mass. In conjunction with the industrial development of the previous century, and emerging as one of its consequences, the proletariat represents an enormous mass already in purely quantitative terms. Furthermore, workers are in fact employed en masse in the production process and, from the standpoint of those with more advanced training, are interchangeable like mass particles. In terms of his social function the individual worker is an element of the mass and he sees himself as such. It would not be a mistake to equate the revolutionary interest of the working class in a socialist transformation of existing relations with their interest in the elimination of conditions that reduced it to a mass. The emancipation of the proletariat is the negation {Aufhebung} of its existence in the form of a mass. Here it is once again confirmed that in principle communism originally had as its aim the consummation of democracy. It does not want to eternalize the mass, but instead to create a social order in which everyone—thus also and precisely the proletariat, which has been restrained at the level of the mass—attain the possibility to develop according to the measure of their individual abilities. But how can a proletariat that has become conscious realize its demands? Only by attempting to amass itself and to utilize its heft as a mass to exact recognition. The nature of the revolutionary interest conditions the specific character of the revolutionary mass, which is the means, not the end. The mass is not a goal, but instead a strategic necessity, of which the proletariat makes use on the basis of tactical reflections that emerge from a theoretical assessment of the current situation. One can see in the proletariat’s relationship to theory that the goal is not their massification, but their liberation from the condition of mass particles. In revolutionary activity emphasis is placed not so much on the organization of mass meetings, as on uniting individuals in small groups and steeping them in theory. But this also means that the revolutionary mass escapes to a certain degree the psychic constitution that characterizes the masses in general. For one thing it contains, at least according to its guiding principles, an avant-garde of thematically schooled individuals. For another, it also lies in the revolutionary interest to activate the consciousness of this mass in such a way that they are able successfully to fight against massification. In an unpublished section of his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin makes a remark on the constitution of the proletarian mass that has far-reaching implications.¹ Horkheimer, as well, carefully distinguishes the revolutionary mass from other masses: “The speaker’s goal then is for the masses to grasp the situation with their own consciousness; the action to be taken then follows from this as a logical consequence. What matters is that things are made clear […] and the leader’s personality can recede, since it is not itself supposed to act as an influencing factor.”² He also underscores the circumstance that work in groups, in the service of expanding individual consciousness, is no less important for a flourishing revolutionary movement than mass gatherings. An episode related by Goebbels illustrates that he was striving exclusively for an expansion of the masses and that the group—if it could not be avoided altogether—was only valued as an opportunity to eliminate individual independence: “We could not yet put together any large militant rallies,” he reports on the beginnings of the Berlin movement (1926), “because the organization did not possess the inner strength for it. We had to limit ourselves to bringing together party members with supporters and fellow-travelers week after week in smaller rooms. In our speeches we focused less on discussing current issues, and much more on explaining the programmatic foundations of our worldview and hammering it into the heads of our party comrades so that they could recite it in their dreams, so to speak.”³ (…)

Mussolini proclaims in the beginning of his ascent, “A period of history is now beginning that could be defined as a period of the politics of the masses.”⁴ And Goebbels regrets that “we are now living in an epoch, in which politics must win the support of the masses.”⁵ Both of these nearly identical explanations—as is clear from the very beginning—do not refer to the politically constituted revolutionary mass of the proletariat, upon which totalitarian propaganda has had relatively little effect. Hitler repeatedly gives vent to his disappointment about this: “The great mass of workers,” he says to Otto Strasser, “do not want anything except for bread and circuses; they have no understanding for any ideals.”⁶ Another time—in the early days of the movement—he assures Oberst Hierl,^* the first point is “to win the masses, even if only the petty bourgeois masses, then the workers will follow.”⁷ This second statement already demonstrates that his desire is less for homogenous masses than for masses as such. On the way to power he must undoubtedly strive to come into contact with masses—at the same time or one after another—which have originated on the basis of common afflictions and common interests; but the ideal is a mass whose composition is not uniform, one whose elements come from different social strata. “The street […] is […] the characteristic feature of modern politics,” says Goebbels. “Whoever can conquer the street, can also conquer the masses.”⁸ One cannot express more clearly that the ideal mass is understood here as the one that has been taken from the street. Hitler’s aforementioned claim, that the great mass of workers has no understanding for any ideals, goes a good way to explain totalitarian propaganda’s pronounced inclination towards this type of street mass—which also and not coincidentally differs from the revolutionary mass in that one of its components is the mob. In reality, Hitler’s criticism is directed against the strong attachment between the ideals and the interests of the revolutionary mass. Hitler can take power only when the evolving ideas have been established to the point where they can be manipulated independently of interests. So of course he must accuse the workers of a lack of understanding when they are unreceptive to his idea-montages {Ideen-Montagen}, because they do not see their own interests in them. In so doing he understandably confuses their indifference to such montages with a lack of appreciation for anything higher. Totalitarian propaganda targets a mass that is precisely not governed and guided by one interest. “Take away from the masses their leaders or seducers,” as Goebbels says again, “then they are masterless and can easily be overcome.”⁹ But leaders and seducers of masses are not only persons but also interests. That is precisely the reason why National Socialism and Fascism prefer masses that can be called ‘broad’ conglomerates, in which many divergent interests clash and weaken one another. The other advantage of “masterless” masses is that they alone satisfy the will to power of the cliques; for as a mish-mash of population groups they seem to represent the people.

If a mass is a mass as such, then it is a “masterless” one; it must therefore embody in particular purity the character that more or less all masses possess. It represents a regression of character traits developed through civilization. As soon as people become an element of the mass, their consciousness deteriorates; the individual in the mass is no longer an individual. Hitler’s detailed comments on this topic demonstrate remarkable insight and shed some light on the—to him—welcome fact that the ‘broad masses’ react primarily with their feelings. “The meager [abstract] knowledge they possess directs their sensibilities more towards the world of feelings.”¹⁰ Accordingly, propaganda claims that it must direct its efforts “at the emotions and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect.”¹¹ Evidence of the destruction of consciousness, which is suffered by the individual reduced to a mass particle, is also found in the observations that the mass does not desire objectivity and that it feels more attracted to a doctrine “that tolerates no other besides itself than to one that grants liberal freedoms.”¹² Hitler dwells particularly frequently upon the inchoate nature of their sentiments, which is so important for propaganda. “And this sentiment […] is not complicated, but very simple and all of a piece. It does not have multiple shadings; it has a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie, never half this way and half that way, never partially, etc.”¹³ And, “the psyche of the broad masses is not receptive to anything that is half-hearted or weak.”¹⁴ Through its submersion in the mass the individual is thus automatically forced into the same regression that totalitarian propaganda carries out consciously, a transformation that in one stroke transports the individual back to developmental stages that were overcome long ago. Ortega y Gasset says of the “mass-man” {German: Massenmensch; Spanish: el hombre-masa}, not only that he has the psyche of a “spoilt child,”¹⁵ but also refers to him as a primitive. “The actual mass-man is, in fact, a primitive, who has slipped through the wings on to the age-old stage of civilization.”¹⁶ If archaic humanity arises in the mass, then it, the mass, must love its “great festive joy,” cruelty. “When the mass acts independently,” as the Spanish philosopher then also claims in a logically consistent and one-sided way, “it does so only in one way, for it knows no other: it lynches.”¹⁷ From this he (explains)^* effortlessly that today since “the masses triumph, {…} violence should triumph and be made the one Ratio, the one doctrine.”¹⁸ Hitler’s clarifications extend deeper than those just mentioned: “the broad masses are only a piece [of] nature.”¹⁹ As a piece of nature it is passive and active, wax and raging torrent. Hitler grasps its hermaphroditic composition; he knows about the “overwhelming power of the mass” that springs from its share in the masculine principle, but he focuses primarily on its feminine receptivity, in which he has a stronger interest.²⁰ “The people in their overwhelming majority are […] feminine by nature and attitude.”²¹ Further, “Like the woman, whose psychic state is determined less by grounds of abstract reason than by an indefinable emotional longing for a force which will complement her nature, […] likewise the masses love a commander more than a petitioner.”²²

II.

Hitler woos the mass like a woman. “Anyone who wants to win the broad masses must know the key that opens the door to their heart. Its name is […] will and power.”²³ Actually, it is called suggestion, and is not any regular key, but rather a skeleton key that can open or shut many different doors according to need.

An attenuation of consciousness certainly also occurs in the revolutionary mass. But this loss has a positive function insofar as it supports to a certain degree the revolutionary interest against the excesses of individualism, and the theoretical education of individuals is also an attempt to counteract this tendency. In any case the revolutionary side does not in principle profit from the psycho-physical structure of the mass particle, whereas the propaganda of the totalitarian movements ruthlessly exploits the willingness of the broad mass to be influenced. As a consequence of the attenuation of consciousness, the “mass-man” finds himself in a condition that borders on hypnosis or at least greatly facilitates hypnosis. Totalitarian propaganda not only does not wake him, but lulls him into an even deeper sleep to impart suggestions to him. Totalitarian propaganda is exceptionally able in this task because its power-obsessed directors claim a right to unconditional authority. Erich Fromm writes, “Among relations between men that resemble hypnosis, the most socially significant is the relationship to authority. Like a hypnotist, it impresses those under its sway.”²⁴ Those who hold power make no effort to conceal the methods they use to profit from the psychic {seelischen} disposition of the mass. Hitler banks on the assumption that everyone who participates in a mass rally feels the “overwhelming power of suggestive intoxication.”²⁵ Goebbels emphasizes the “suggestion of an effective speech” and praises with the justified pride of an artist the day of the awakening nation—which he organized on March 4, 1933—as a perfect example of mass hypnosis.²⁶ “No one can doubt that this day was the greatest propagandistic achievement accomplished in Germany in human memory. But this achievement was only possible because we refrained from all other work for an entire week and kept the eyes of the people focused in a hypnotic trance solely on this one event. Then, of course, we were also able to record a major success.”²⁷ For a skillful hypnotist it is in fact not impossible to distract good subjects from their interests and to excite their passions in regard to some goal or another. Hitler states, “the impetus to the mightiest upheavals on this earth has at all times consisted less in a scientific knowledge dominating the masses than in a fanaticism which inspired them and sometimes in a hysteria which drove them forward.”²⁸ Does not a hysterical person behave capriciously? The mood of the inconstant mass can easily be changed by a Mark Antony.^* Accordingly, Hitler pays most attention to their endurance. “Their emotional attitude at the same time conditions their extraordinary stability. Faith is harder to shake than knowledge, love succumbs less to change than respect, hate is more enduring than aversion.”²⁹ This observation is meant formally; it refers to the unwavering obedience of the masses to the directives given to them. In fact, the hypnotists do everything possible and use their power both to fanaticize the masses and to extirpate their memory.

The entire style of the National Socialist and Fascist mass rally can be explained in terms of their aim to place the mass, which is already predisposed to it, completely into a hypnotic sleep. For this reason their rallies unfold—differently than revolutionary mass gatherings, which are unmasking, not mystification, and whose basic features demonstrate a sober, unceremonial character—in a magical atmosphere, whose function is the further attenuation of consciousness. With the conscientiousness of a magician, who makes all the preparations necessary to increase the credulity of the audience, Hitler attempts to create such an atmosphere. As indicated by the previously cited statement,³⁰ he chooses the evening hours for his gatherings, because people put up less resistance to being violated by the will of another in the evening. He pays attention to space just as carefully as he does to time. “There are spaces that leave one cold for reasons that are difficult to discern.”³¹ And when he compels the mass gathering to wait for him for hours, his aim here as well is to tire them and thus put them in a condition that will permit him “to uproot emotional prejudices, attitudes, sensibilities, etc. and to replace them with others.”³² To support this undertaking the hypnotic powers of authority are brought to bear. “Any meeting that is protected exclusively by the police,” says Hitler in a passage dedicated to the SA, “discredits its organizers in the eyes of the broad masses.”³³ That means that the organizers do not appear in possession of the authority necessary to direct the mass. Hitler himself alludes to why he desires the display of power. “From the very beginning it was important to introduce blind discipline in our meetings and absolutely to guarantee the authority of the committee in charge. For what we said […] in content and form was always suited to provoke a reply from our opponents. And opponents there were in our meetings!”³⁴ Put differently, the assertion of authority should stifle any independent impulses in the consciousness of the mass, so that the latter becomes even more lacking in will and alertness. It has the desired effect: “soon no more hecklers, no more dissenters dared to come forward,” reports Heiden from the early days of National Socialism in Munich. “With what seemed like the wave of a magic wand, the mood in Hitler’s gatherings became simpler, more unified and more faithful.”³⁵ On a daily basis this wave of the wand helps those who are the Führer’s fist to create miracles of belief that get people to entertain even the most absurd propositions. Hypnotists normally proceed by letting their patient stare at a shiny object. The shiny object used by totalitarian propaganda is the symbol that plays a decisive role in all the mass rallies it organizes. It is not as if the revolutionary mass does without, or even could do without symbols, but since the function of symbols always depends on the intention behind their use, in the case of the revolutionary mass they contribute principally to keeping progressive consciousness alert and protecting it from the integrating power of the status quo. The symbols enthroned by totalitarian propaganda, in contrast, refer to nothing at all that exists outside of the propaganda itself; instead, their meaning is exhausted in the role they play as an instrument of propaganda. “In red,” so interprets Hitler the National Socialist flag, “we see the social idea of the movement, in white the nationalistic idea, in the swastika the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man, and, by the same token, the victory of the idea of creative work, which as such always has been and always will be anti-Semitic.”³⁶ Graphic signs of inflammatory recruitment ideas, these symbols are intended to facilitate the manipulation of the mass, and to reinforce the docility with which the mass obeys the suggestions of the will to power. Horkheimer remarks aptly, “the great importance placed on symbols, ceremonies, uniforms, and phrases, which attain the same sanctity as flags and coats-of-arms, follows from the necessity of an irrational bond tying the masses to a policy which is not their own.”³⁷ And, on a similar note, a sentence of {Ernst} Krieck’s reveals just how much National Socialist symbols are intended to agitate people’s drives and emotions {Triebleben}. Krieck praises the National Socialists’ masterful practice of the “art of domination, of the excitement and manipulation of mass gatherings.” He continues, “Based on the same instinct, National Socialism prefers to work with symbols, with their captivating visibility, rather than with rational concepts. The swastika, greeting rituals, and the Third Reich have the direct mobilizing power—akin to the subterranean—of all that is symbolic.”^§ Totalitarian propaganda knows very well the reason why it amasses so many symbols. The denser the primeval forest of flags into which it lures the mass, the more submissively it follows the voice that rings out in the dark.

“The power which has always started the greatest religious and political avalanches in history rolling,” says Hitler, “has from time immemorial been the magic power of the spoken word.”³⁸ An insight followed directly by another: “particularly the broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of speech.”³⁹ But there is more. In order to underscore the defining political significance of mass speeches, Hitler and company usually play them off against political literature, which is denigrated as much as possible. In a passage that has already been cited, Hitler speaks—misrecognizing the connection between theory and praxis—with disdain of the “mode of writing of Marxist church fathers,” who have allegedly contributed far less to conquering the working masses than the tens of thousands of propagandists and agitators.⁴⁰ And if Goebbels wants to express how much National Socialism owes to its public speakers, he clothes this conclusion in the following form: “the National Socialist movement has grown through its speakers, not its journalists.”⁴¹ In short, totalitarian propaganda dedicates itself with conspicuous zeal to subordinating the written word to the spoken word. Undoubtedly this zeal comes from the fact that they view the former as an instrument of Enlightenment—the correct use of which could alienate them from the masses—and the latter as the principal means of influencing the masses. Goebbels weighs one against the other: “Even when a speaker can usually […] reach only a few thousand people with his words—in contrast to a writer, who sometimes finds tens or hundreds of thousands of readers—the spoken word, in fact, influences not only those listening directly; they pass it along and carry it forward in hundreds and thousands of ways.”⁴² So, would the resonance of these two forms of communication be approximately the same from a quantitative point of view? But since the aim is, after all, not to awaken individual consciousness, but rather to direct an unconscious mass, Goebbels must of course opt for speech and come to the conclusion that “the suggestive power of an effective speech […] still towers above the bookish suggestion of a leading article.”⁴³ Indeed, based on this desire to use the power of suggestion, he demands of writers that they utilize the illusion of speech: “For us the leading political article (for example, in Der Angriff) was a written poster or, even more accurately, a speech in the street put onto paper. […]^* It intentionally presupposed as common knowledge that of which the reader should actually be convinced, and drew from this the inexorable consequences. The reader should get the impression that the author of the leading article is actually a speaker who is standing next to him and who wants to convert him to his opinion with simple and compelling thought processes.”⁴⁴

“Magical power of the spoken word.”⁴⁵ The mass speech developed by totalitarian propaganda proves its magical power in that it escalates hypnotic sleep into deep sleep and then seizes control of the unconscious. Hitler describes (graphically) the rapport that the speaker should maintain with those souls who are manipulated in both senses of the term. “He will always let himself be borne by the great masses in such a way that instinctively the very words come to his lips that he needs to speak to the hearts of his audience. And if he errs, even in the slightest, he has the living correction before him.”⁴⁶ In conjunction with this, Hitler does not neglect to highlight and explain the function of the mass speech. “Here again it is not seldom a question of overcoming prejudices which are not based on reason, but, for the most part unconsciously, are supported only by sentiment. […] False concepts and poor knowledge can be eliminated by instruction, the resistance of the emotions never. Here only an appeal to these mysterious powers themselves can be effective; and the writer can hardly ever accomplish this, but almost exclusively the orator.”⁴⁷

How is the speaker successful with such an appeal? In regard to the formal structure of the speech, he relies on two rhetorical devices: repetition and apodictic claims. “The mass,” explains Hitler, “will commit to memory only a thousandfold repetition of the simplest concepts.”⁴⁸ He incessantly repeats this conviction, which he once formulated succinctly as follows: “But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success.”⁴⁹ Reinforcing Hitler’s experience, Goebbels concludes a speech in the Berlin Sports Palace with the dithyrambic quatrain:

Whoever wants the same and always only the same

He unlocks the vault of heaven

Before him even the Gods must bow

And say: come and take. You seize what is yours.⁵⁰

When a mother reads fairy tales to children, they long for repetition, and not only of the meaning of the story; they always wish to hear the same exact words repeated. The child, lying gently within the wooden bars of the crib, is lulled to sleep by these familiar sounds, which in sleep become the building materials of dreams. By using the principle of repetition, the speaker pushes the mass down to the level of children and into a condition in which they no longer take in anything except what he constantly repeats. Stereotypical formulas attain enchanting power; passing through them, the mass identifies with them. The mass is what the words say that monotonously trickle down, presupposing of course that the material, out of which it should be composed—according to the will of totalitarian propaganda—is conveyed to them in a tone of absolute certainty. Since every doubt stirs slumbering consciousness, even the possibility of a doubt threatens to destroy the magic. “The level of speeches at National Socialist rallies,” as Wilhelm Stapel spells out in his study, Christianity and National Socialism, “is characterized by very skillful methods of operating with the idea of mass individuals and avoiding factual arguments whenever possible.”⁵¹ Similarly, Krieck: “Based on a revolutionary instinct, National Socialist agitation works primarily not with intellectual proofs and arguments, but instead with the primordial power of rhythm.”⁵² Refraining from arguments is thus also motivated by the interest in deepening the hypnotic effects.

For totalitarian propaganda everything depends on whether or not the concrete suggestions of mass speeches—inflammatory arrangements of ideas, directions for behavior, posthypnotic tasks, etc.—can truly capture the “mysterious powers” that hold sway in the unconscious. This requires two things. First, the speaker must “speak the language that the mass understands,” as explained by Goebbels, who provides additional, more detailed information about the foundations of this language.⁵³ According to him, the art consists in “the elimination of all arabesques and anything superfluous, in order to make these primitive thoughts clear to the people, but also to carry them into the public sphere with momentum and force.”⁵⁴ This recipe demonstrates the intention of the mass speech to strengthen the tendency of the “broad” mass to regress to a primitive stage and cynically to take full advantage of it. Second, the speaker must set in motion the primitive instincts and feelings, to which he appeals, in such a way that his audience abandons all previous engagements and yields unconditionally to his suggestions. According to a statement taken by Münzenberg from Goebbels’s book Moderne Politische Propaganda,⁵⁵ the “Reich propaganda division of the NSDAP”^* set forth in its guidelines for rally themes that “sensational current events, scandals involving Jews or Marxists”⁵⁶ should be chosen in order to stimulate “curiosity, rage, or the hope of experiencing a sensation.”⁵⁷ The totalitarian mass speech is indeed similar to sensational literature in that it produces images of horror and happiness. One minute the speaker invokes in the darkest of tones the diabolical machinations of real or imagined enemies, the next minute he indulges in messianic prophecies, in the vision of the “ultimate goal” {Endziel} that Hitler promises the mass again and again. He preaches the inevitable cataclysm and promises in the same breath the certainty of salvation—just like the medieval charlatans who appear at the annual fair in luxurious costumes and accompanied by music in order to peddle their elixirs. “Come and see! This cures all pains, bruises, tooth aches, rabies and scabies.”⁵⁸ To be sure, the apotheosis forms the conclusion, but the dark chasm is exposed not only to make it appear more fascinating; rather the opposite is truer, namely, that enthusiasm also serves to intensify horror. Enthusiasm dissipates and the mass speech would soon cease to resonate if it appealed solely to easily generated hopes. Its intention is precisely to mobilize not only hope, but also curiosity or rage and, like other totalitarian propaganda events, to cause an oscillation of the elementary movements of the psyche {Seelenbewegungen}. For only if it produces such movement in the depths, is it able to take hold of the entire system of “mysterious powers” and put it in the service of their suggestions. But the mass soul will submit itself to these different suggestions even more blindly, if the speech also has the effect of replacing the repressed individual consciousness of the mass particles with a pseudo-consciousness that is in its control. “The Jew,” declares Goebbels, “is the same thing for the people as a tuberculosis bacillus is for a lung. The tuberculosis bacillus is not dangerous until it comes into contact with a weak lung. The Jew becomes dangerous when he comes into contact with a weak people.”⁵⁹ In National Socialist speeches one finds thousands of formulations like this, whose razor-sharp and primitive logic is reminiscent of children’s drawings. They behave precisely as if they had the intellect of the mass in mind. In truth, however, the intellect to which they lay claim has its foundations in a psyche that has already been manipulated. This intellect is imposed through suggestion upon the mass in order to make them forget that their own intellect has been forfeited. Power prevents individual consciousness from sinking deeper roots in this psychic foundation, because it too has been artificially grafted onto mass-man.

With the aid of other hypnotic techniques, which are usually supplemented with the elementary rhythms of military marches, the mass speech successfully carries out a totalitarian manipulation of opinion. The mechanism of totalitarian propaganda functions so wonderfully that, once it has been set in motion, it hardly needs to function any longer. Neither is it necessary to implement all the propaganda devices, nor is it important that speeches are understood. A fleeting hint from the stage-production is all it takes, and the mass is already hypnotizing itself.

III

Although totalitarian propaganda does in fact attempt to win over the broad masses, it still cannot proclaim often enough—as has been demonstrated—that it holds them in contempt. As if it wanted to emphasize this contempt even more, it never misses an opportunity to celebrate the “personality” {Persönlichkeit} at the expense of the mass. Hitler commands the party to “promote respect for personality by all means,”⁶⁰ and comments upon this wish with the following words: “the organization must not only not prevent the emergence of thinking individuals from the mass; on the contrary, it must in the highest degree make this possible and easy by the nature of its own being. In this it must proceed from the principle that the salvation of mankind has never lain in the masses, but in its creative minds.”⁶¹All efforts seem directed toward putting the person, instead of the mass, on center stage. “The greatest revolutionary changes and achievements of this earth, […] the immortal deeds in the field of statesmanship, etc., are forever inseparably bound up with a name and are represented by it.”⁶² It is self-evident that these efforts to inflate the prestige of the person must culminate in the cultic idolization of Hitler and Mussolini. Their lives become myths and their names are spun into legends.

Thus, on the one hand, totalitarian propaganda imposes itself violently upon the mass; on the other hand, it strives to dismiss and devalue this same mass. Is this a contradiction? One should first recall the aforementioned observation that the concept of personality targeted at the masses by the National Socialists receives its particular stamp from the will to power that drives the movement forward. The Führer, as the embodiment of this will to power, commands the apparatus he founded through a hierarchy of demagogues {Verführer}, whose authority flows from his own absolute authority and also represents it within a more or less limited region of power. So when Hitler insists that “the state must have the personality principle anchored in its organization from the smallest community to the highest leadership of the entire Reich,” he makes evident that for him personality means the representative of power.⁶³ The personality that he means can have no other character than the nihilistic one of National Socialism itself. Consequently, it manifests itself in the pursuit of power as such and rises above the mass through its ability to perform ruling functions. One sees once again, and more clearly than before, that for propaganda personality means that species of superior human {Herrenmensch} that is indispensable for the totalitarian regime in its pursuit of power. But one also sees that the National Socialist and the historically inherited concepts of personality cannot be reduced to a common denominator. Horkheimer returns repeatedly to the fact that the leaders of bourgeois revolutions in the past were not apotheosized any less than the modern dictators—which for him can be explained by the necessity of captivating the masses to distract them from certain social demands that the revolution, as precisely a bourgeois revolution, was not able to fulfill.^* Deification of the irrational personality in the past as today. The image that one has of the person has changed fundamentally, and this transformation reveals changes in economic and social relations. As a fruit of the bourgeois revolutions, nineteenth-century democracy—with its parliamentarism and liberal capitalism—constructed itself on the belief in reason, which of course was limited to the extent that it did not come into conflict with the concerns of the bourgeoisie. Since individual consciousness is the point where reason enters into the world, that era celebrates the conviction that politics and the economy are regulated by the free competition of enlightened individuals. Democracy is put to use by the individual; so it must see in personality the perfected individual. It is not for nothing that personality in Goethe’s sense is the individual who has developed his capacities in a harmonious and multifaceted way.^† This ideal of personality associated with democracy is distinguished by the fact that it is directed against the formation of masses. In the context of a bourgeois-democratic regime, the leader is not celebrated as a ruler of the masses, but instead as a role model whom everyone should emulate. And, from this democratic perspective, the more that the masses dissolve into individuals, and the individuals mature into personalities, the more successful are economy, progress and civilization {Gesittung}. Whereas socialism affirms this valuation of the individual so unreservedly that it wants to achieve its universal recognition, the National Socialist movement uses the concept of personality in order to liquidate the individual. But they use it in such a way that differs from its original use just as monopoly capitalism differs from liberal capitalism, which illustrates once again their alliance with the capitalist powers. The interest of big capital, which has been pushed into a defensive position and become increasingly dependent on violence, is not the struggle of opinion—that it would lose—but instead the death of opinion; not the disappearance of the mass, but its domination; not the development of the individual into a personality, but the “personality” that knows how to subdue a mass. Whether the totalitarian dictatorships have been summoned to rescue capitalism in danger, or they are simply using it to enhance their own power—they are, in any case, breeding a type, without which capitalism would have to surrender: the type of the man of power, the mass hypnotist. Instead of working against the development of masses, this kind of personality compels their rise. It is one pole of the totalitarian regime; the mass is the other. They mutually condition each other. The personality demanded by National Socialist propaganda posits the mass and is posited by the mass. “A leader,” says Goebbels, “does not emerge randomly […]. He grows with the mass and the larger it gets, the more the genuine leader grows beyond the mass.”⁶⁴

And nonetheless totalitarian propaganda holds the masses in contempt? Without doubt, contempt is really the feeling that grips a ruler in relation to one who is dependent upon him. But whether this contempt is genuine or feigned, in all cases it is conspicuously displayed for propagandistic reasons. One time, this display—sublimely pursued—is likely the product of the cynicism mentioned earlier. It is intended to test the depth of the hypnotic sleep of the mass and also to inject them with the belief that they are insignificant in comparison to the personality {of the leader}. The next time, the mass is condemned in order to carry out an effective polemic against the workers’ parties which, like the totalitarian movements, have to win with mass rallies. National Socialist propaganda tries again and again to protect itself from this troublesome competition by claiming that the revolutionary left is engaging in shameful idolatry with the mass, and the National Socialists are the first to treat them in the way they deserve. “The National Socialist movement,” assures Goebbels, “does not blindly worship the mass and sheer numbers, as do the democratic-Marxist parties.”⁶⁵ At the congress of the labor front, which met in Berlin on May 10, 1933, Hitler justifies the liquidation of Marxism and the union organizations with the following words: “For we know very well the final aim of this entire development, no, this struggle between fist and forehead {Faust und Stirn}, between mass, i.e. number, and quality: annihilation of the quality of the forehead.^* But this means not only a blessing for the number, or simply the elevation of the worker; on the contrary, it means poverty, misery and privation.”⁶⁶ Such typical mirror reflections demonstrate that the totalitarian, not the proletarian, movement targets the mass. Needlessly, Hitler even goes so far as to invoke the archetype {Urbild} of the truth, instead of its reflection {Spiegelbild}: “The mass rally is also necessary,” according to Mein Kampf, “for the reason that in it the individual, who at first, while becoming a supporter of a young movement, feels lonely and easily succumbs to the fear of being alone, for the first time gets the picture of a larger community, which in most people has a strengthening, encouraging effect. […] In the crowd he always feels somewhat sheltered […], when the visible success and agreement of thousands confirm to him the rightness of the new doctrine and for the first time arouse doubt in the truth of his previous conviction—then he himself has succumbed to the magic influence of what we designate as ‘mass suggestion.’ ”⁶⁷ According to this, the mass which is “massified” {massierte}^* in both senses of the term by totalitarian propaganda, is supposed to function as a form of Heimat.^† The revolutionary mass, in contrast, is always just a passageway to Heimat.^‡ It turns out that contempt for the mass is not at all opposed to the need for it. By openly spurning the mass in the name of personality, National Socialism is merely expressing its own proclivity for the mass. For the personality, with which it is concerned, comes into its own only in the presence of large masses.

When totalitarian propaganda appropriates aspects of the revolutionary mass demonstration, such as parades, speaking in unison, etc., it does so not only to make its own mass event appear revolutionary, but also above all because the methods developed to activate the revolutionary mass can be utilized to consolidate masses in general. Such a consolidation is no doubt a side effect of the various actions of the revolutionary mass, but its decisive task remains to manifest the will that animates the homogenous proletarian mass before it has formed itself into a mass. As soon as totalitarian propaganda exploits the procedures used in the revolutionary camp, their function changes and the side effect becomes the main effect. The same actions and long-term developments, which the one side directs toward revolutionary goals, lose on the other side any purpose of transcending the mass, and now serve only to transform the mass into a tough, rigidly structured formation. These actions are limited to provisions to lend structure to the mass. Because the mass constantly appears here, there and everywhere {an-, auf- und oben erscheint} at the command of Fascist and National Socialist propaganda, it gets caught up in a steady movement that takes hold of all its elements and the movement becomes an end in itself.^* The mass as such {das Massenhafte} consolidates itself through the uninterrupted activity of the mass particles. The type of this activity makes it clear that it truly aims for nothing other than the thoroughgoing formation of the mass. In the actions of the revolutionary mass spontaneity appears, which demonstrates that these actions do not so much rigidify the mass, as instead express a common interest. The actions of the National Socialist and Fascist masses, in contrast, are directed from above and arranged as rituals. But they assume the character of ritual in order to create the illusion that the masses are performing cultic practices that increase their invincibility. As with symbols, totalitarian propaganda also accumulates many rites, because the more the masses must perform, the more firmly they are yoked, and the better (consequently) their cohesion is secured. Furthermore, the ceremonial duties with which the mass is burdened are so created that its usefulness increases along with its stability. This observation proves once again that the meaning of these duties does not extend beyond the mass. What is essential is not the content of the mass actions, but instead the rhythm of their execution. Krieck remarks in conjunction with a passage already cited,⁶⁸ National Socialist agitation works “with everything that is related to rhythm and that emanates its stimulating power, such as speaking in unison.”⁶⁹ In other words, speaking in unison and other activities demanded of the masses aim to facilitate the handicraft of the propagandist. Some of these activities—as the description of Silone mentioned earlier illustrates—unfailingly induce self-hypnosis.

Being dependent upon the broad mass, totalitarian propaganda incessantly strives to artificially produce the broad mass. The prophecy of Mussolini, that a new period of history is dawning, which one could define as a period of the politics of the masses, was less a prophecy than a program: in fact, Fascists and National Socialists produce the masses for the sake of their own power politics.⁷⁰ One year after the seizure of power, Hitler assures the “Old Guard” in Munich: “Just as we used to address the people in ten thousand, in one hundred thousand single rallies, so in the future we must also continue this struggle with ten thousand and one hundred thousand rallies and mass meetings, in order at least once a year to make an appeal to the entire nation. If the appeal is not well received, no-one should say that the people are to blame; instead he should say that the movement has become lazy. The movement is no longer fighting properly, the movement has lost touch with the people. And from this one will be able to learn once again how to immerse oneself in the people. This is where our strength lies.”⁷¹ The ideological vocabulary of these sentences hardly conceals Hitler’s actual opinion, according to which the National Socialist movement fails at its task when it does not succeed in conveying the suggestion appropriate at any given time so effectively—through the constantly renewed formation of the mass—that one can rely upon such appeals to the nation being carried out. For this reason, mass gatherings have become the rule; so far, attendance at mass rallies has been obligatory. The totalitarian dictatorships do not assemble the masses when there is genuine reason to do so; instead, they create artificial reasons, which serve as a pretext to organize mass gatherings. Only the outsider will misunderstand these innumerable rallies, which interrupt the labor process again and again, and damage the entire land, as a superfluous and unproductive affair. In truth, they are, like terror, a prerequisite of the system. So much so, that even when the formation of the mass takes places on the occasion of a politically important event, the question remains open whether or not this event, notwithstanding its significance, has been conjured up in order to further the formation of the mass. Within the sphere of power of the totalitarian regime, propaganda is not merely an instrument of politics; politics is also an instrument of propaganda. The aforementioned explanation from Goebbels, who requires the radio to broadcast all possible events of national relevance, demonstrates not least that the imaginative powers of National Socialist and Fascist propaganda know no limits when it comes to conjuring up the mass out of nothing. German radio has indeed been systematically developed as a medium for producing and vastly expanding the mass.^* Fritz Morstein Marx^† emphasizes in his superb study “State Propaganda in Germany,” the propagandistic value of the Volksempfänger, whose production was a National Socialist initiative.⁷² This particular use of radio demonstrates that National Socialist propaganda is not actually trying to realize its frequently proclaimed intention of transforming the mass into a people {Volk}; on the contrary, in the interest of the total manipulation of opinion it seeks to transform the entire people into a single mass susceptible to suggestion. The ideal is attained when the entire people permanently constitute themselves as a mass rally, or at least when all individuals find themselves constantly in the state of mass particles. This aim no doubt runs contrary to the tendency of the regime to celebrate the family, but one will yet see how their propaganda—precisely because of its totalizing ambitions—becomes caught up in antimonies over time and as a result is increasingly forced to shed all content and to reveal ever more nakedly the will to power that is its source. With its largely successful reduction of individuals to mass particles, it additionally bound together members of the people {Volksangehörige}, also in a progressive sense. It creates the illusion {Schein} of a unity of the different social groups or classes which, regardless of their divergent interests, belong together under the rule of monopoly capitalism, and not only in a spurious way.^* For, in so far as monopoly capitalism also places previously privileged population groups into a state of dependency, it does reduce the violence of existing differences. The artificial production of the mass, which is supposed to make it possible for totalitarian propaganda to influence people against their own interests, reflects at the same time—of course, in a distorted way—a common interest, which may reveal itself sooner or later. Undertaken in order to maintain appearances {Schein}, it indirectly undermines social reality.

IV

Like terror, the mass addressed by the totalitarian movements is not only a means of propaganda, but is itself propaganda. It seduces in the first place because—in this regard also like terror—it represents power.” [In his book] Propaganda and National Power, Hadamovsky recognizes that, “The most effective power of the mass rally is every palpable form of the expression of power, that is, in the first place the number of participants, the size of the rally, and beyond that, everything that appears as power, people with arms and in uniforms, weapons of all kinds.”⁷³ The inherently appealing character of the mass already insures that it has an effect; add to this, that the power speculating on this type of mass is not satisfied with its inherent power of attraction. Incapable of rational justification due to its nihilistic character, it tries twice as hard to dazzle. The totalitarian dictatorships know exactly why they constantly engage in grandiose actions and why they infuse the concepts of the imperium and the Reich—these projects and projectiles of their will to power—with such beguiling brilliance. The brilliance embellishes the tatters of those who bask in it, so that they become convinced they are wearing elegant apparel, not tatters. But the mass itself provides an excellent opportunity to dazzle, provided one makes use of the match-making services of an art that can be best designated as the art of mass images {Massenbildkunst}. This art, which has been systematically introduced by Fascist and National Socialist propaganda, consists in orchestrating the ensemble of the mass in such a way that it exerts an aesthetic attraction. By transferring the mass demonstration from the political or social realm into the aesthetic sphere of the monumental spectacle, which captivates the senses like the nihilistic parade, totalitarian propaganda not only increases the cohesion of the mass, it also nips in the bud—as has already been pointed out—any question of the purpose of forming masses.

A French observer describes how the works of the National Socialist art of mass images are produced and which sensations they evoke in the spectators: “And […] in the same way that the leader has made himself into the organizer of the obedient masses,” writes Erich Wernert in his study L’art dans le Troisième Reich, “he has also made himself the organizer of those mobilized masses, those human masses […] or actually those masses that no longer have anything human about them and that form and reform themselves in an overwhelming rhythm.”⁷⁴ The masses no longer have anything human about them; however, in their intention to annul the human as a standard, the totalitarian dictatorships realize the aesthetic grandiose in inhuman material. This is the overwhelming appearance of power; its function is to tear people out of the sphere of interests into a sphere in which they imagine they have been elevated above themselves and they are partaking in the magnificence that is presented to them, or that they themselves represent.

Totalitarian propaganda celebrates the people as the quintessence of power and its magnificence. Thus, in order to make the spell that emanates from the composition of the mass completely irresistible, National Socialism seeks by all means to create the illusion that it forms the mass into the people. It is not a coincidence that for the majority of its marches propaganda drums together only so-called deputations from the most diverse areas of the country; the more it churns up the population, the more it strengthens the impression of an identity of the people and the mass. It merely reflects this tendency when Dressler-Andress,^* the President of the Reich Chamber of Radio, goes so far as to claim that “the radio […] is […] the mouthpiece of the entire people,” even though the National Socialist radio is in fact the mouthpiece that those in power use to belabor the broad masses.⁷⁵ To his previous assertion, Dressler-Andress adds another: “the radio has become the pioneer of a true culture and art of the people.”⁷⁶ The claim of National Socialist propaganda, that demonstrations have conjured up the people, would be convincingly proven if the people’s alleged resurrection manifested itself through cultural and artistic achievements. The National Socialist propagandists speak again and again about the necessity or even the existence of art that has its roots in the people, and in so doing take aim at contemporary art, which they view as degenerate and accuse of individualization, intellectualism and internationalism. “The deeper art springs from popular culture {dem Volkstum}, the higher will be its international standing,” says Goebbels, although he simply conflates art that really does emerge from popular culture with the “people’s art” that he propagates.⁷⁷ But what National Socialism considers art does not have the people as its origin, but instead as its target; more importantly, it is an art intended to cloud the impression that the broad mass is the people. However, by commanding art to march along this path, totalitarian propaganda stifles art. For art worthy of the name, it is precisely this criterion of judgment that cannot be used, namely, whether or not it—following Goebbels’s formulation—springs from the depths of popular culture. Whether it presents itself as popular or esoteric, glorifies the people or not, has nothing to do with its origins. It depends much more on the respective artistic intentions and social relations. Without doubt, an artist like Picasso is more closely connected to the people than a random painter, who paints the people by order. And also art that takes the people as its subject is not by any means—as long as it is genuine—identical with National Socialist conceptions. Instead of enslaving itself to this or that doctrine, it shows the reality of the people that goes beyond such doctrines, particularly ones that are so unequivocally instrumental such as those of the totalitarian regime. In his wonderful book about Dickens, Chesterton^† says the following about him: “in this matter he was the people. He alone in our literature is the voice not merely of the social substratum, but even of the subconsciousness of the substratum. He utters the secret anger of the humble.”⁷⁸ Goebbels knows, of course, that art is not able to flourish under a diktat, and thus makes it seem as if the totalitarian regime granted complete artistic freedom, with the exception of absolutely necessary limitations. In his public remarks to filmmakers,^* he emphasizes “that the national government does not intend to promote films with standardized clichés. This is not possible because art is free and should remain free. But certainly with one reservation. It must feel bound to certain political, moral and ideological {weltanschauliche} norms, that do indeed exist and without which a common national existence appears impossible.”⁷⁹ But this argumentation is mere shadow-boxing, because the reservations in question are not simply an essential condition of common national existence; on the contrary, as a product of totalitarian propaganda, which eliminates the right to question and to individual freedom of opinion, they in fact rob art of the air it needs to breathe. “The aesthetic doctrine of the Third Reich,” remarks Wernert, “insists on the existence of the constantly renewed cycle of the people, the artist, the people, etc. It views this cycle as the very essence of the artistic process. If the people is the purpose of all things, and also of art, then the artist bears a heavy responsibility […]. This responsibility encompasses three domains of duty. Above all, the artist must give expression to the race, the nation and the ideal of Germanic beauty; furthermore, he must carefully ban from his art all elements that could corrupt the soul of the people {Volksseele}; finally, he must instruct the soul of the people and make it conscious of its unity and strength.”⁸⁰ Wernert also sees that the inherent nature of these demands favors certain forms of art, which—like the art of mass images—are also well suited to influence masses of people in the desired way. “In order to glorify this totalitarian and unifying spirit, the regime has succeeded in strengthening and giving expression to certain forms of art that are better suited than any other to this collective action: for example, music, theater, architecture, ceremony. Through the people’s choir, the Thingspiel^* and the gigantic structures it erected, through the large national gatherings which were conducted masterfully, the regime has succeeded in drawing in the masses.”⁸¹ As a witness of artistic events, Wernert concludes that the arts favored by National Socialist doctrine have successfully fulfilled their duties. In a Thingspiel the choirs sang a march and all of Germany marched along: “One becomes aware of a tumultuous German mass, but one that is expanding everywhere: in the galleries, on the stage and also beyond the set. One is reassured, made happy, by the observation that all of Germany marches and that Germany is one’s own self and all of the others. The old and romantic rumbling of the Germanic tribe runs through everyone present in the mass. The miracle occurs: for a few seconds the Volksgemeinschaft is a living reality.”⁸² Admittedly, National Socialist art aims for such psychological effects; so does this mean that it should be equated with the “genuine culture and art of the people” envisioned by Dressler-Andress?⁸³ If it were, the content of its creations would have to confirm the existence of the people: “In short, what can one say about contemporary German art? Only this: it is nothing more than a form of political propaganda, run like the economy, and mobilized like most other national activities.”⁸⁴ Popular art? Utility art {Volkskunst, Gebrauchskunst}. First, National Socialists and Fascists deform the people into a manipulable mass, then they avail themselves of the arrangements, posters and decorations, in which utility art exhausts itself, in order to deceive the mass into thinking that they guarantee these values. Thus, the totalitarian regime commands the mass to remain in existence; but its domination is based on the reproduction of the mass.

V.

The analysis of the principles guiding totalitarian propaganda cannot be concluded any better than with the following words of Goebbels: “The National Socialist movement created its most active propaganda troops in the form of the SA. […]^* A modern political struggle is fought with modern political means, and the most modern of all political means is propaganda. Propaganda is basically the most dangerous weapon that a political movement can deploy. Against all other means there is a counter-measure; only propaganda is unstoppable in its effects. If, for example, a Marxist society is shaken in its belief […] then it is already overcome because it immediately surrenders its power to resist.”^† Even if the last sentence turns out to be a propagandistic exaggeration—the nihilistic will to power that animates the Fascist and National Socialist cliques and leads them to monopoly capitalism, has created for itself in this propaganda—which functions with the combined methods of terror and the formation of masses—an instrument of incomparable force.

Translated by John Abromeit

NOTES

1.   1.    [Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 217–52. See also “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (second version), trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 3: 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 101–33. See also “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (third version), trans. Harry Zohn and Edmund Jephcott, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 4: 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 251–83.]

2.   2.    [Max Horkheimer, “Egoism and Freedom Movements: On the Anthropology of the Bourgeois Epoch,” in Max Horkheimer: Between Philosophy and Social Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 78.]

3.   3.    [Joseph Goebbels, Kampf um Berlin Der Anfang, vol. 1 (Munich: Franz Eher Nachfolger, 1934), 32.]

4.   4.    [Mussolini quoted in Il Popolo d’Italia, March 18, 1919; Kracauer citing Silone, Der Fascismus, seine Entstehung und seine Entwicklung (Zurich: Europa Verlag, 1934) 33.]

5.   5.    [Joseph Goebbels, speech given before the press on the construction of the Reich propaganda ministry on March 15, 1933, in Berlin, in Helmut Heiber, ed., Goebbels-Reden, Vol. 1: 1932–1939 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1971), 217–21, 220.]

6.   6.    [Adolf Hitler’s conversation with Otto Strasser on May 21, 1930, is recounted in Otto Strasser, Hitler und Ich (Leipzig: Johannes Asmus Verlag, 1948), 137. Kracauer’s citation is from Konrad Heiden, Adolf Hitler: Eine Biographie, vol. 1 (Zürich: Europa Verlag, 1936) 273.]

7.   7.    [This quotation preserved from Hitler can only be found in a relevant collection of National Socialist writings, which purports the existence of a correspondence between Hierl and Hitler: Deutsche Sozialisten am Werk, ed. Friedrich Christian zu Schaumburg-Lippe (Berlin: Deutsche Verlag für Politik und Wirtschaft, 1936), 17. Kracauer’s citation is from Willi Münzenberg, Propaganda als Waffe (Paris: Editions du Carrefour, 1937), 146.]

8.   8.    [Goebbels, Kampf um Berlin, vol. 1, 86.]

9.   9.    [Goebbels, 68.]

10. 10.    [Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. 1, Eine Abrechnung (Munich: F. Eher, 1934), 227.] {Our translation. Kracauer cites the wrong page here.}

11. 11.    [Mein Kampf, 197.] {English: Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin: [1943] 1971), 180.}

12. 12.    [Mein Kampf, vol. 1, 44.] {42 (translation amended).}

13. 13.    [Hitler, vol. 1, 201.] {183 (translation amended).}

14. 14.    [Hitler, vol. 1, 44.] {42 (translation amended).}

15. 15.    [José Ortega y Gasset, Der Aufstand der Massen (1931), 41.] {English translation: The Revolt of the Masses (New York: W. W. Norton, [1932], 1957), 58.}

16. 16.    [Ortega y Gasset, Der Aufstand, 59.] {Revolt of the Masses, 82.}

17. 17.    [Ortega y Gasset, Der Aufstand, 86.] {Revolt of the Masses, 116.}

18. 18.    [Ortega y Gasset, Der Aufstand, 86.] {Revolt of the Masses, 116.}

19. 19.    [Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. 1, 371.] {338. Brackets in Kracauer’s original.}

20. 20.    [Hitler, vol. 1, 201.] {183.}

21. 21.    [Hitler, vol. 1, 201.] {183.}

22. 22.    [Hitler, vol. 1, 44.] {42.}

23. 23.    [Hitler, vol. 1, 371.] {338.}

24. 24.    [Erich Fromm, “Theoretische Entwürfe über Autorität und Familie: Sozialpsychologische Teil,” in Studien über Autorität und Familie: Forschungsberichte aus dem Institut für Sozialforschung (Paris: Librairie F. Alcan, 1936), 107.]

25. 25.    [Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. 1, 535.] {Our translation. The page Kracauer cites here is incorrect.}

26. 26.    [Goebbels, Kampf um Berlin, vol. 1, 19.]

27. 27.    [Joseph Goebbels, Revolution der Deutschen (Oldenburg: Stalling, 1933), 147f.]

28. 28.    [Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. 1, 371.] {337–38.}

29. 29.    [Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. 1, 371.] {337.}

30. 30.    [Kracauer, Werke, vol. 2.2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2012), 73.] {Totalitäre Propaganda (hereafter TP), ed. Bernd Stiegler (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2013), 62–63.}

31. 31.    [Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. 2, 541.] {Our translation. Kracauer cites the wrong page here.}

32. 32.    [Hitler, vol. 2, 280.] {Our translation.}

33. 33.    [Hitler, vol. 2, 546.] {487.}

34. 34.    [Hitler, vol. 2, 541]. {483.}

35. 35.    [Konrad Heiden, Adolf Hitler: das Zeitalter der Verantwortlosigkeit. Eine Biographie, vol. 1 (Zurich: Europa Verlag, 1936), 113.]

36. 36.    [Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. 2, 557.] {496–97. Kracauer incorrectly cites p. 554. He (or those who transcribed his manuscript) also writes “rationalistic” instead of “nationalistic.”}

37. 37.    [Horkheimer, “Egoismus und Freiheitsbewegung,” 177.] {English: “Egoism and Freedom Movements,” 63.}

38. 38.    [Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. 1, 116.] {106–7.}

39. 39.    [Hitler, vol. 1, 116]. {107.}

40. 40.    {Kracauer refers here to a passage in section B of this essay, which can be found in Werke, vol. 2.2, 73.}

41. 41.    [Goebbels, Kampf um Berlin, vol. 1, 19.]

42. 42.    [Goebbels, 19.]

43. 43.    [Goebbels, 19.]

44. 44.    [Goebbels, 200.]

45. 45.    [Kracauer, Werke, vol. 2.2, 100] {TP, 88.}

46. 46.    [Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. 2, 527.] {470.}

47. 47.    [Hitler, vol. 2, 527–28]. {471.}

48. 48.    [Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. 1, 203.] {Our translation.}

49. 49.    [Hitler, vol. 1, 202.] {184.}

50. 50.    [Joseph Goebbels, speech on February 10, 1933, at the Berlin Sports Palace, in Wilfried Bade, Joseph Goebbels: Deutsches Volk und deutsche Männer, vol. 5 (Lübeck: Charles Coleman, 1933), 70.]

51. 51.    [Wilhelm Reich, Die Massenpsychologie des Faschismus (Cologne: Kiepenhauer & Witsch, 1986), 54.] {Our translation.}

52. 52.    [Ernst Krieck, Nationalpolitische Erziehung (Leipzig: Armanen-Verlag, 1932), 38.]

53. 53.    [Goebbels, Kampf um Berlin, vol. 1, 46.]

54. 54.    [Goebbels, Revolution der Deutschen, 147.]

55. 55.    [Joseph Goebbels, ed., Moderne Politische Propaganda (Munich: F. Eher, 1930).]

56. 56.    [Also in: Reichspropaganda-Leitung der NSDAP, ed., Kampfschrift, vol. 1: Arbeiterverrat (Munich: F. Eher, 1932), 19.]

57. 57.    [Kampfschrift, 19.]

58. 58.    [According to the manuscript, Kracauer is quoting Roger Mauduit here. The quote could not be located.]

59. 59.    [Joseph Goebbels, “Um die deutsche Scholle,” speech on May 11, 1930 in Munich, in Revolution der Deutschen, 27–34, 31.]

60. 60.    [Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. 1, 387.] {352.}

61. 61.    [Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. 2, 497]. {446.}

62. 62.    [Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. 1, 387.] {352.}

63. 63.    [Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. 2, 501.] {449.}

64. 64.    [Joseph Goebbels, “Hitler über Deutschland,” radio program from the Siemens plants in Berlin during the celebration of the nation on October 11, 1933, in Goebbels, Signale der neuen Zeit: 25 ausgewählte Reden (Munich: F. Eher, 1934), 317–23, 318.]

65. 65.    [Goebbels, Kampf um Berlin, vol. 1, 40.]

66. 66.    [Adolf Hitler, Die Reden Hitlers als Kanzler: das junge Deutschland will Arbeit und Frieden (Munich, F. Eher, 1934), 46.]

67. 67.    [Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. 2, 535–36.] {478–79. Translation amended.}

68. 68.    [Kracauer, Werke, 2.2, 103.] {TP, 91.}

69. 69.    [Krieck, Nationalpolitische Erziehung, 38.]

70. 70.    [Kracauer, Werke, 2.2, 93.] {TP, 81.}

71. 71.    [Adolf Hitler, speech to the “Old Guard” of the Party in Munich on March 19, 1934, in Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, 1932–1945, vol. 1, ed. Max Domarus (Vienna: Löwit, 1973), 367.]

72. 72.    [Fritz Morstein Marx, “State Propaganda in Germany,” in Propaganda and Dictatorship: A Collection of Papers, ed. Harwood Lawrence Childs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1936), 11–35.]

73. 73.    [Eugen Hadamovsky, Propaganda und nationale Macht (Oldenburg: Stalling, 1935), 52. Kracauer here citing Münzenberg, Propaganda als Waffe, 179.]

74. 74.    [Erich Wernert, L’art dans le IIIe Reich: Une tentative d’esthétique dirigée (Paris: Paul Hartmann, 1936), 7ff.]

75. 75.    [Horst Dressler-Andress, “Volkstum und Heimat,” in Der nationalsozialistische Staat: Grundlagen und Gestaltung. Urkunden des Aufbaus. Reden und Vorträge (bis zum November 1933), ed. Walther Gehl (Breslau: Hirt, 1933), 221–26, 221.]

76. 76.    [Dressler-Andress, “Volkstum und Heimat,” 221–26.]

77. 77.    [Goebbels, Revolution der Deutschen, 191.]

78. 78.    {G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens (London: Methuen, 1913), 133.}

79. 79.    [Willi Krause, Reichminister Dr. Goebbels (Berlin: Verlag Deutsche Kultur-Wacht, 1933), 55.]

80. 80.    [Wernert, “L’art dan le IIIe Reich,” 28.]

81. 81.    [Wernert, 120.]

82. 82.    [Wernert, 100.]

83. 83.    [Kracauer, Werke, 2.2, 116.] {TP, 102.}

84. 84.    [Kracauer, 116.]

---

1. * {Konstantin Hierl (1875–1955) was a senior military figure who established one of the Freikorps units after the Great War and was involved in the suppression of the Spartacist uprising in 1919. He joined the National Socialists in 1927 and took a leading role from 1929. He was elected to the Reichstag in 1930 and from 1932 was involved in the organization and administration of the workforce and labor. He was convicted and imprisoned in 1948 for his participation in the Nazi regime and was released in 1953.}

2. * {“Explains” is in parentheses in the original text.}

3. * {The German original has “Antonius.” The editors of the Suhrkamp edition presume that the reference here is to Mark Antony (ca. 82–30 BCE) and his famous oratory in Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Julius Caesar (1599).}

4. § {No reference is given by Kracauer here. Ernst Krieck (1882–1947) was a leading and influential figure in the development and implementation of a National Socialist (NS) pedagogy. Trained as a teacher, he first agitated for an NS mode of education during the 1920s. He joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP) and published his Nationalpolitische Erziehung in 1932. He subsequently held various prominent positions in academia, including professor of philosophy and pedagogy and rector in Frankfurt-am-Main, professor in Heidelberg, and rector in Baden. He was, at the same time, a leading figure within the Nazi movement itself and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). He was the editor of numerous pedagogic journals. Arrested after the war, he died in custody.}

5. * Goebbels founded the weekly newspaper Der Angriff (The attack) in 1927. By 1932, there were two daily editions. Although Goebbels himself lost interest in the paper, its readership grew to over three hundred thousand copies by 1944. Its main contents were Nazi ideology, anti-Semitic and racist propaganda, and various attacks on the Weimar Republic in general and particular individual figures. It was temporarily prohibited in 1931.}

6. * {As of 1923, the NSDAP engaged a head of propaganda. Once reestablished in 1926 after the party’s temporary prohibition, the propaganda division was led by Gregor Strasser, by Hitler himself and then, as of 1930, by Goebbels. It was responsible for the control and coordination of NSDAP propaganda, and, though there was much interconnection and sharing of personnel, it remained formally independent of the Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda itself. In its early years, its focus was on the use of radio as a mass medium.}

7. * {The reference here is once again to Horkheimer’s essay “Egoism and Freedom Movements: On the Anthropology of the Bourgeois Epoch.”}

8. † {This theme is most evident in Goethe’s second novel, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–1796), a work that became the model of the bildungsroman.}

9. * {“Workers of the fist and the forehead” (Arbeiter der Faust und Stirn) was an expression used by the Nazis to refer to blue- and white-collar workers. Hitler used it—for example—on campaign posters during his run for president in 1932.}

10. * {In German, massieren means to bring people together in one place, usually for military purposes. But Kracauer is also using the term here in the sense of transforming people into a mass in social-psychological terms.}

11. † {In German, Heimat means literally “homeland,” but it also implies a tight-knit, organic community, often inextricable from a particular locale with long-standing traditions. The term usually has conservative implications and was popular among both the traditional and fascist right in the 1920s and 1930s.}

12. ‡ {Here, Kracauer seems to be appropriating the conservative concept of “Heimat” (see footnote 11) and attempting to give it a revolutionary reinterpretation. Kracauer’s appropriation here reminds one of similar moves by other Weimar leftist thinkers—such as Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch—who attempted to uncover the utopian and potentially emancipatory content of certain key conservative ideas. Bloch ends his three-volume magnum opus, The Principle of Hope, with a discussion of Heimat. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 3, trans. N. Plaice, S. Plaice, and P. Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 1370.}

13. * {The editors of the German edition remark that “an-, auf- und oben erscheint” is conjectural, since the original text is unclear here. TP, 200.}

14. * {The National Socialists were quick to see and exploit the potential of the new radio medium for propaganda purposes. Goebbels himself recognized the need to leaven political news, speeches, and other propaganda broadcasts with popular entertainment to maximize the appeal and reach of the medium. The production of inexpensive radio sets (the Volksempfänger, or “People’s Receiver,” was introduced in 1933; the Deutscher Kleinempfänger, or “German Small Receiver,” followed in 1938) resulted in a massive increase in radio ownership and audiences such that, by 1941, more than 60 percent of German households had a radio set. Public broadcasts were also used to reach those for whom the radio nevertheless remained unaffordable.}

15. † {Friedrich Wilhelm Julius Morstein Marx (1900–1969) was a German legal scholar who “emigrated” to the United States in 1933. He held various academic positions at U.S. institutions before returning to Germany after World War II. He was chair of comparative administration and public law at the Hochschule in Speyer where he became an emeritus professor in 1968.}

16. * {In the text, Kracauer uses the abbreviation “MK” for “Monopolkapitalismus.”}

17. * {A veteran of World War I, Horst Dressler-Andress (1899–1979) became active in cabaret and theater in the 1920s and devised a political framework for radio and cultural organization within the NSDAP. He held various cultural positions within the party and the Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, including leadership of the KdF. He worked in various positions, including propaganda, in Poland during the war. After internment during 1945 and 1948, he became active again as a theater director and actor in the DDR.}

18. † {G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) was an English journalist and writer. He is perhaps best known today for his creation of the Father Brown detective stories, several of which Kracauer himself reviewed at the time.}

19. * {Goebbels recognized in film a key medium for mass propaganda. The Reichsfilmkammer (Chamber of Film) was a subcommittee of the Reichskulturkammer (Chamber of Culture), established in 1933, and was integrated into the Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. Since membership of the Reichsfilmkammer was a prerequisite for employment in the industry, some 1500 filmmakers, actors, technicians, and other workers, finding themselves either expelled or excluded because they were Jewish or on account of their political views, left Germany, some of them making their way to work in the expanding film studios in Hollywood. From 1934, the Lichtspielgesetz (Film Law) heightened the pre- and postcensorship regimes and intensified control of filmmaking and distribution. By 1941, the entire German film industry was under state control through the directorship of the Ufa-Film company.}

20. * {As a particular form of open-air theater involving audiences in the dramatic action, the Thingspiel was developed primarily by Wilhelm Carl Gerst from 1929. Its usefulness was increasingly recognized by the Nazi authorities in the early 1930s, and it came under the auspices of the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda in 1933. By 1934, some sixty open-air theaters had been built, and, in the following years, between two hundred and four hundred more were planned or begun. A performance of a Thingspiel by Eberhardt Wolfgang Möller marked the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936. However, Gerst had by this time already lost his position and influence and the Thingspiel itself was renamed Freilichttheater (open-air theater). The cultic elements dramatized by the Thingspiel increasingly ceded importance to the new mass media of radio and film and their promulgation of the Führerkult.}

21. * {Founded in 1921 as the paramilitary wing of the Nazi movement, the SA (Sturmabteilung, or “Storm Detachment”) were also known as the “Brownshirts” on account of their uniforms. They played a key role in the rise of the movement—intimidating opponents, carrying out acts of violence, providing “security” at rallies and speeches—and by 1933 numbered some three million men. Hitler, however, grew increasingly fearful of its power and influence under the leadership of Ernst Röhm. On June 30, 1934, the “Night of the Long Knives,” up to two hundred leading figures of the SA were arrested and executed. Formerly just a subdivision of the SA, the SS (Schutzstaffel, or “Security Force”) under Heinrich Himmler came to the fore as its replacement. Though overshadowed by the SS, the SA was not formally disbanded until 1945.}

22. † {Goebbels, Kampf um Berlin, 91. This quotation from Goebbels is actually missing in Kracauer’s text. As the Suhrkamp editors point out, his reference system allows for the identification of the absent quote but not its precise extent.}

 

2

Totalitarian Propaganda

____________

Section G

I.

Propaganda orchestrated to win power cannot cease after the seizure of power. This follows necessarily from the principle according to which Fascism and National Socialism emerged. Were both movements to identify with a real societal interest, then their victory must effect not so much the continuance of propaganda as its dismantling, for the satisfaction of such an interest would speak for itself, and would not require total influence over opinion to earn them recognition. Should Moscow’s propaganda have assumed totalitarian forms in the Soviet Union, that would be a sign of the regime’s withdrawal from its original conception. Doubtless the totalitarian movements, invariably misrecognized, can and will satisfy one or another societal interest they encounter along the way, but their actions are not determined by such interests. Rather, they are predeterminately grounded in a nihilistic will to power {Machtwille} stemming from war, and this requires no lasting ties with any social interest. Thus, since the rulers see themselves as obliged to manipulate and disavow existing interests, and since they are also predisposed to take into account their experience in war that power is not won and upheld by force alone (Goebbels confirms in 1933 that “The national government has no intention of sitting on bayonets”), all their acts are necessarily accompanied by propaganda indeed are at the same time propaganda themselves.1 Propaganda is not merely a means used only occasionally by modern dictatorships; it is anchored in the fundament of these dictatorships.

And, instead of carrying less weight after the seizure of power, propaganda becomes from this moment on effectively totalitarian. In his speech to the press, 16 {sic} March 1933, Goebbels states: “In setting up the new Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, I see a revolutionary act of government in as much as the new government no longer intends to leave the people to their own devices.”² But he also says: “If this government is determined, never to yield … then it cannot be satisfied in the long run to know that 52 per cent are behind it, in order to terrorize the remaining 48 per cent with that figure, but will see its next task as winning over the 48 per cent.”³

Obeying the impulse implanted in them, the dictatorships set to work after the seizure of power and prepare an adroit national apparatus of power, with the help of which they intend to realize their dream of the imperium or the Reich. These goals determine the course of National Socialist and Fascist foreign policy. In order to overcome difficulties arising in the domain of foreign policy, propaganda will have to proceed according to the same methods—appropriately modified, of course—used to seize power at home. Certain idea-montages are not without effect abroad, provided terror lends them sufficient force. But the purpose of this investigation is not to pursue the use within foreign policy of propaganda methods which have already been analyzed, but to indicate how propaganda develops once it has become a monopoly. The task is to reconstruct the development of effective totalitarian propaganda within its own dominion. In the course of this process, world propaganda of course assumes an ever more decisive role, and this will be taken into consideration at given points.

Despite all their differences, Fascist propaganda proceeds in the same direction as National Socialist propaganda. If the following representation refers more to conditions in Germany, then this is primarily because National Socialism—in this it was truly German—attached great importance to the constant “ideological” {weltanschaulich} legitimation of its procedures, and so is particularly revealing.

II.

The installation of total propaganda is tied to that of terror. “This statutory, almost absolute rule over life and death,” declares Heiden of conditions after 1933, “was expanded and refined piece by piece.”4 And Silone: “Fascism has never eschewed the use of terror to dominate the country.”⁵ Totalitarian dictatorships eschew its use so little that they sweep aside the few bulwarks that protect against it and introduce a law that corresponds with the National Socialist rule “Whatever benefits the people is right”⁶ {“Recht ist, was dem deutschen Volke nützt”}.^* Since, as has been shown, the concept of the people {das Volk} is purely a cover term in National Socialist parlance for nothing more than the will of the ruling clique, then this statement must be understood along the lines of: what is right is—according to the definition of the National Socialist Huber—whatever heightens the “force of political power.”⁷ According to Huber, “Civil liberties, institution and institutional guarantees cease to exist in the people’s constitution. The underlying reason for this is that the principle of ‘guarantee’ has itself been surmounted in a people’s constitution. The liberal constitution was essentially a ‘guarantee;’ it is a system of safeguards and assurances vis-à-vis state power. The people’s constitution does not have this guarantee function; on the contrary, it is meant to heighten the efficacy and force of political power. It is not supposed to protect individuals and groups from the whole, but instead serves the unity and entirety of the will against all individualistic and group-based disintegrations.”⁸ “There are workers’ rights,” writes Silone with reference to Alfredo Rocco,^* who formulated the juristic doctrine of Fascism, “only as allowances of the state. They exist only as reflected rights. The authority of Fascist trade unions is a reflected authority, granted by the authority of the State.… This State authority is the only original, non-reflected authority, the source of all law. So, there is no Fascist legality, no written body of laws, out of which an opposition movement could derive a justification of its existence. The only law is that of the bourgeois {bürgerlich} state. All concessions it can make are nothing more than that: concessions, temporary allowances.”⁹ Allowances can be revoked, and the totalitarian regime really does not shy away from disavowing its own laws just as soon as their implementation might hinder its claim to totality. Elections to German works councils do not take place, the statutory provision of symmetry between the unions of employers and employees in Italy exists, according to Silone, only on paper.¹⁰ The law that, in a democracy, regardless of its class character, still limits power {Macht}, is transformed into an instrument of pure power. The illegal power {Gewalt} exercised by the Gestapo and the Fascist militias, as explained above, must appear as doubly arbitrary if it is constantly accompanied by legal power; the terror effect produced by this association is further increased by the fact that the legal power itself only maintains the semblance of legality.¹¹ The installation of terror goes hand in hand with the artificial production of the masses, and once all measures have come into force which compel the desired shift in the psycho-physical structure, then totalitarian propaganda can become effective. It functions all the better when the dictatorship is in a position to corrupt wide strata via the allocation of positions, offices and sinecures.

The seizure of power imposes an obligation on totalitarian movements to make good their propagandist promises, or at least to attempt to fulfill them. The NS State accomplishes—no matter how—tasks which de facto fulfill promises: it promotes the political centralization of Germany, which wasn’t even tackled by social democracy; it eliminates the problem of unemployment. Inasmuch as these accomplishments further real societal interests, they do so for reasons that are independent of these interests. The standardization of the state apparatus is meant to strengthen the power position of the regime, and the elimination of unemployment is for the sake of the prestige it will bring. Of course, the regime never fails to exploit for propaganda purposes the fact that some of its achievements meet societal needs. Indeed, we may venture to assert that one or another of these achievements arises not least from propagandist necessity. Motorways and drained Pontine Marshes are the Potemkin villages of totalitarian dictatorships.^*

The real problem after the seizure of power is not, however, fulfilling what can be fulfilled, but dealing with those propagandist promises which the totalitarian movements cannot satisfy at all, in consequence of their approach. What is meant here is the creation of class equality {Klassenausgleich}, which in National Socialist Germany includes the creation of the Volksgemeinschaft. Mindful of Fascism’s misuse of the concept of the trade union, Angelica Balabanoff elaborates:^† “Here, too, we find the hallmark of Fascism: promises are not kept, cannot be kept, nevertheless the semblance {Schein} of fulfilment is created.”¹² The compulsion to create this semblance requires the dictators to seize upon a series of measures which, from the outset, are acts of propaganda. Their function is to evoke the impression that class antagonism is liquidated and an internally unified people is a reality.

Among these acts of propaganda, the first to be highlighted are those groups which may be called direct since they behave as if they substantially changed the relationship between employees and employers; whether, like National Socialist employment law and the German Labor Front,^* by treating both classes as symmetrical formations, or as organizations such as Strength through Joy (Kraft durch Freude, KdF)^† or the Fascist Dopolavoro, by granting employees special privileges.^‡ But the symmetry is exhausted in formalities, and the benefits leave the position of the employee in the production process untouched. Such procedures, that treat only the symptoms, do not in fact help the bourgeoisie in general, but do indeed benefit big business and, above all, the ruling clique. That they are undertaken in the interests of power and aim solely to lend weight to the illusion of class equality is revealed in the arguments put forward by Dr. Ley on 27 November 1933 before the German Labor Front as he establishes the “KdF” organization.^§

“The words coined by the Führer stand above everything: ‘How do we best sustain the nerves of the people, knowing that to pursue politics one needs a people with strong nerves?’ ”¹³ Thus, this organization is set up, neither for the sake of the workforce, nor for the people, but as a prerequisite for the power politics of the totalitarian dictatorship. The KdF serves to build up the National Socialist apparatus of power.

“Unfulfilled longing,” Dr. Ley explains further, “generates envy. But when the German is allowed his share in life’s bounty, he will no longer be filled with envy and hatred, but with happiness and gratitude. This results in the second contribution of the movement.… It is to kill the inferiority complexes in the working people.”¹⁴ In other words: The institutional purpose of Kraft durch Freude is to render social resentments harmless by bestowing a few vicarious gratifications on proletarian and proletarianized strata within the framework of what already exists. Unable to remove the causes of inferiority complexes, it does not in truth eliminate them but sedates the “working people” so that they forget them.

“Thirdly, the organization should ward off boredom in the people. Boredom gives rise to stupid, rabble-rousing and, indeed, ultimately criminal ideas and thoughts. Dull tedium makes men brood, gives them a sense of homelessness {Heimatlosigkeit}, in a word: a feeling of absolute superfluity. Nothing is more dangerous for a state than that. And so we are going to build camps on heath and mountain, and all across the uplands of the Rhine, where Germans will spend their holidays in discipline and camaraderie.”¹⁵ Recreation is therefore structured to deprive its coerced consumers of joy of any free time in which they might come up with “criminal ideas and thoughts” i.e., pursue their class interest. Obviously, the way to prevent such trouble is by systematically filling the tiniest gaps in leisure time. In camps and on ships, it is easy to keep holidaymakers under the lasting influence of propaganda, and the more magnificent the natural setting, the more it too becomes a vehicle of propaganda.

“The Office for Teaching and Training {Amt für Unterricht und Ausbildung] will enable everyone to acquire knowledge and skills free of charge. We will, however, only promote this hunger for training in those who are truly suitable and capable.”¹⁶ These sentences declare that Dr. Ley’s organization, in as much as it monopolizes education, prevents individual freedom of expression—the play of which must immediately destroy the illusion of class equality. It is not enough that the organization confiscates leisure, it promotes only the people of its choice. Anyone who doesn’t pay homage to National Socialism will have difficulty accessing knowledge, and the knowledge that is on offer will from the outset be of a National Socialist persuasion. So it is that any thirst for knowledge that jeopardizes the totalitarian regime is manipulated.

Among the measures striving to deal directly with the unattainable, there are those related to the Volksgemeinschaft. Wishing to substantiate its existence, the party leaders collect on the streets for the winter relief programme {Winterhilfswerk}; in a similar vein, mass visual art and other aesthetic productions must have the same effect as these symbolic acts. Describing National Socialist architecture, Wernert writes: “Architectural monstrosities intended for gatherings of the people convey to those who gaze upon them no sense of balance, of scale and rhythm; they express only that relentless physical force, the force of the avalanche, the irresistible oppressive force; they evoke the masses who populate them, the German Volk.”¹⁷ Images of, and for, the masses, the purpose of which is to simulate the existence of the Volk, transform themselves thanks to their magic and all possible propagandistic ingredients into the very proofs of existence.

Direct acts of propaganda are supplemented by indirect. Passions are unleashed against some adversary outside the sphere of the class struggle—whose presence or absence incidentally makes no difference—and immediately any differences existing within the sphere lose their importance. Antisemitism indirectly deepens the impression of the unity of the people—and the economic beneficiaries of anti-Jewish legislation are those least likely to welcome any diminution of that impression. The same indirect effect is achieved by the cult of power and the leader; as power, through its glorification, appears to be elevated above the classes, so the psychological significance of class interest is automatically subdued. It is for this reason that the Nurnberg Congress Hall has to be the biggest.^* Gigantic proportions call to mind the power that is becoming absolute, and precisely this glaring emphasis of its absolute nature means the conception of the real Volk can be surmounted by the fiction of the Volksgemeinschaft. Finally, there are those propaganda acts which serve only to reinforce. Fascism is concerned to ensure the punctuality of the trains; National Socialism promotes hygiene and values the publicity potential of beautifully arranged factory yards and workplaces. In their efforts to keep up appearances, every means of seduction is right.

“With us, seeming {Schein} has become being {Sein}”—with these words, spoken in 1932, Goebbels certainly also wishes to express the conviction that the National Socialist regime hopes to transfer the idea of class conciliation {Klassenversöhnung} and of the Volksgemeinschaft into reality.¹⁸ The propaganda acts undertaken after the seizure of power do indeed conjure up a new reality in that they create numerous institutions and organizations and generally steer the whole conduct of the people. But this reality is to be bracketed since it only comes about under the pressure exerted by the terror and the production of the masses {Massenerzeugung}. The extent of its reliance on the unremitting assistance of totalitarian propaganda is made clear by the exhortation of the SA Gruppenführer Schöne at a conference in East Prussia:^* “We still haven’t learned to see everything from the point of view of propaganda. Propaganda must therefore be used more.”¹⁹ Knowledge of the general rule covering the dictatorships’ reality is also apparent in Silone’s comments about Mussolini: “He is doomed to play carnival Caesar to the end of his days, to keep his facial expression in check at all times.”²⁰ Reality in the totalitarian state is a pseudo-reality. For, if Fascism and National Socialism are unable to achieve the unity of the people, then they are obliged, of course, to create a synthetic reality in which unity seems to be an actuality. Thus, Goebbels’s statement would more correctly read: “With us, seeming has become the semblance of being {Schein des Seins}.” This pseudo-reality differs from the actual reality it has largely eliminated in that it is a product of the will to power as the latter becomes absolute, its actions disregarding societal requirements whenever necessary. “In a way, as of a certain point,” Heiden says, “power is always right, as it no longer needs to adapt its assertions to circumstances but can change circumstances according to its assertions.”²¹ This helps to explain the consistency with which the world of pseudo-reality develops: what doesn’t add up is made to add up. Another feature of this world is that it extends deep into the regions of the absurd; if the unattainable must be considered attained, then absurdity does become a necessity. As a result of its consistent and at the same time absurd character, the pseudo-reality has something of a drawing by the insane come to life.

For totalitarian dictatorships, everything depends on the maintenance of the psycho-physical constitution in which this pseudo-reality works as reality. “Once a Marxist following is shaken in its ability to believe …, then it is already overcome; for it instantly relinquishes its power to resist.”²² This remark from Goebbels illuminates, as a mirror reflection, the structure of National Socialist and Fascist rule. If Goebbels’s theory is followed to the letter, then it seems that the totalitarian regime would fall apart if at any point, even for only a second, the total influence over opinion were interrupted. Hence the humorlessness of the modern dictatorships—humor might damage the fine weave of propaganda; hence their efforts to underpin the acts of propaganda with precautions, the sole purpose of which is to prevent any slippage from the sphere of pseudo-reality. And the more constantly people are kept in a state of eager anticipation of directives issued from above, the less fear there is of such slippage. Totalitarian propaganda incorporates its own agents of suspense. By privileging a heroic life over a happy one, and the Volksgemeinschaft over the individuals who comprise it, propaganda encourages psychological forces of attraction to develop that thwart any individual’s relapse into her/his special existence; with its time-limited plans, it constantly seeks new ways to keep all those subjected to it on tenterhooks. In his 1936 book, Das deutsche Wirtschaftswunder, Hans Erich Priester^* remarks of the second German four-year plan²³: “A prime concern remains the need to ensure that the first so-called four-year plan does not simply run without further ado, but to put something new in its place.… People want to be compensated for shortcomings in the present with change in the future.”^† This means that the four-year plans, like all projects tied to a deadline, serve to reinforce that state of mind in which the reader of sensational novels {Kolportageromane}, caught up in the suspense, will not stop reading at any price. The threat of armed conflict also creates tension, an effect not to be underestimated—it is a threat which produces the same oscillation between conflicting emotions and convictions that is so indispensable to propaganda. The presence of crisis has a similar effect as the calculated threat of war. A thoroughly dialectical relationship prevails between the totalitarian regime and crisis. On the one hand, Fascists and National Socialists wish to fulfil their promises of better times by overcoming the crisis; on the other hand, they need the crisis in order to justify the dictatorship to the masses. If there were no crisis, then it would have to be invented by the totalitarian movements. “Is there a way out of … the difficult situation?” writes Priester. “What Germany needs is the transition of the pseudo-economic growth into a real economy growth. This is not unattainable. However, one precondition must be met: The Third Reich must reach a political understanding with the world.”²⁴ But this way conflicts not only with the will to power of National Socialism, but equally with its need for a continuation of the crisis, the value of which can hardly be overestimated. The pressure of the crisis strengthens the pressure of the terror and the tensions and vibrations emanating from the crisis reinforce the pseudo-reality. Incidentally, totalitarian propaganda likes to make use of the possibility of transforming some measures which originally had no propagandist significance into agents of suspense, simply by the way they are employed. It is not unusual for them to be used for acts of foreign policy, in order to relieve weariness with domestic policy. Fundamentally, then, any act can achieve the significance of an act of propaganda.

Plebiscites represent spot checks of the psycho-physical constitution associated with the pseudo-reality; to say nothing of the fact that their proliferation is intended to produce tension and their success to increase the prestige of the leadership at home and abroad. The positive outcome of these plebiscites is guaranteed, not only by terror, but also by the questions, which wisely refer to national existence. The plebiscites are not meant to establish the opinion of the masses, but on the contrary to show quite starkly the extent to which the masses have been deprived of their freedom of opinion. A proclamation of the will of the people turns into a proclamation of the power of the regime over the will of the people. What Silone said of the union elections is true also of the plebiscites: they are the “means by which the masses can confirm their connection {Anschluβ} to the government.”²⁵ In a turn of phrase already cited elsewhere, Hitler himself declares that the purpose of such voting manoeuvres is to demonstrate and control the steadfastness of this “connection.” “If the appeal is not well received, no-one should say that the people are to blame; instead he should say that the movement has become lazy. The movement is no longer fighting properly.… And from this one will be able to learn once again how to immerse oneself in the people.”²⁶ Like the plebiscite, the National Socialist Reichstag is a farce. Its eerie antics reveal at a stroke those of the entire pseudo-reality.

III.

The expansion of the apparatus of power keeps pace with the build-up of the propaganda machine. The ruling caste installs itself; it implements military armament and seeks to transform the army into its instrument; bending to the force of circumstances and the logic of the will to power, it develops the organized capitalism of the postwar period into a kind of steered economy—the so-called military economy, which takes its impetus from the regime’s aims of imperialist expansion and in reality satisfies monopoly capitalist interests, though of course without wholly identifying with them.…

But the question here is not the construction of the National Socialist and Fascist apparatus of power, but the course of totalitarian propaganda. Holding the monopoly, propaganda lines up act after act and assertion after assertion {Setzung} with absolute authority: are these acts and assertions such that they fit into a unified whole without special modifications? On the contrary: the more established the regime becomes, the more propaganda finds itself in the predicament of disavowing some of its own claims and striving to reconcile contradictions. Apart from very few contents, there is in fact nothing to which it would be able to commit definitively. As was said above of the pseudo-reality, what doesn’t add up will be made to add up. The inconsistency consists precisely in the divergences that form in the field of propaganda.

They can be explained in the first instance by the fact that totalitarian dictatorships must take into account an intrinsically contradictory societal reality. Leaving aside the medley of interests with which foreign policy must deal, class differences at home are by no means a thing of the past, and nor are groupings of peasants, the middle classes, the churches, etc. Thus: “In the first flush of enthusiasm,” writes Heiden, “the social problem is benumbed, but not resolved.… The social circumstances remain, and the class differences remain; these are the societal facts of the National Socialist dictatorship of 1937.”27 What is more, this reality is constantly being recast by the actions of the regime; new potential conflicts arise, new needs make themselves heard. A mix of criss-crossing interests and tendencies brings about necessarily heterogeneous situations—situations which could be addressed within the democracy through the struggle between parties. Since, according to its guiding principles, the totalitarian regime aspires to power per se and, in order to win this power, displays a nihilistic indifference toward all contents, it will not hesitate to modify its realization-convictions {Realisierungs-Überzeugungen} according to the current situation. As a consequence of the rupturing of the social fabric, it must go on and on annulling commitments made by the propaganda.

The glaring conflict between the acts of the dictatorships and their propagandist promises conjures up crises both in Italy and in Germany which threaten the collapse of the pseudo-reality. According to Silone, the Matteotti Crisis^* is “the result of the blatant contradiction between the government policy of Fascism and the interests and wishes of the majority of the population, including the Fascists.”²⁸ And the National Socialist crisis of 1934 stems from the disappointment of the left wing of the party that the government is clearly moving with big business instead of fulfilling its pledge to find a socialist solution.^* At that time, as the “second revolution” festers in Germany, the very propaganda that once demanded the communalization of the department stores and the nationalization of already socialized businesses heaps argument upon argument to make the discontented masses understand the contrary behaviour of the regime. At a rally on 14 May 1934, Goebbels rounds on the “moaners {Miesmacher}”:^† “No-one is going to take an economy which everyone knows has been mismanaged and replace false methods with wholly new ones in an instant. When an economy is fighting for its life, it first needs to be given a modicum of good health.”²⁹ And, at a regional party congress in Essen on 25 June 1934, he declares: “A single blunder could destroy our economic life.”³⁰ But such sophisms fail to make any real impression on the SA with its left-leaning old Freikorps leaders, and so they are replaced five days later by the execution squads, whose powers of persuasion are, of course, incontestable. The middle classes are more easily manipulated. Although they, too, despite their early solidarity with the National Socialist and Fascist movement, must likewise learn to think little of propaganda promises, they will—because the regime draws functionaries from their circles and breathes some life into middle-class illusions—always obscure the monopoly-capitalist character of the totalitarian dictatorships. In his study of the problem for small businesses in the Third Reich, Das Mittelstandsproblem im Dritten Reich, published in 1934, Benedict Schmittmann finds “that National Socialism has not lived up to the group-centred {gruppenegoistisch} hopes of the small business community {gewerblicher Mittelstand}.”^‡ This is no longer necessary, he continues, “since the Volksgemeinschaft puts an end to class division and, instead of class stratification, the movement itself, embodying the people, acts as an all-defining stratum and, through its leadership, reconciles interests.”³¹

One by one, the contents of propaganda fall victim to the acts of the regime. The concept of autarky is removed from usage when the momentary requirements of National Socialist economic policy demand its abandonment, only to be back in the limelight to publicize the second Four-Year Plan. The concept of the entrepreneurial personality, played off against Marxism, evaporates before our eyes thanks to the economic measures of the regime. Writing in the Völkische Beobachter in early January 1934, Gottfried Feder assures the reader that “The danger of Marxist economic policy was precisely that it dragged the State down into the sphere of production and would have preferred to make the State itself into some gigantic economic machinery, with the result that every creative personality and every self-sufficiency in the economy would have been destroyed.”³² In the interim, National Socialism has in fact proven to stifle the very private initiative it extols. Its propaganda vows to sanctify the family and protect it from destruction at the hands of Marxism; its actions are dictated by the desire for total power and must therefore undermine any entity like the family. The eradication of the individual and the requisitioning of youth through the Party and the state run directly contrary to the cult of the family which has brought the petit-bourgeois masses to National Socialism. Moreover, the regime does not hesitate for a moment to intervene in the intimacy of the home. A recent decision of the chancery court in Frankfurt-Höchst, which was applauded by the magazine Deutsches Recht, denied a divorced mother custody of her two children “because she had registered the son in a boarding school and wanted the daughter to have a convent education.”³³ Another recent verdict of a German court states that “derogatory remarks about Party leaders made in the family circle are to be considered public insults.”³⁴ It is telling that, in the same edition of Kulturkampf, mention is made of an attempt by the SS magazine Das Schwarze Korps to justify male infidelity on biological grounds.^* Marriage ceases to be an arcanum, and time spent inside four walls is like sitting on the street.

The independent existence of societal reality not only destines the dictatorships to incessant changes of direction in their actions but also frequently compels them to decide upon ever differing ways to propagandize one and the same action. Contents mean nothing, and if propaganda makes no impression with one motif, it will deliver a second and third in its place. “Obviously there is no discussion,” Goebbels explains in an interview published by the Berliner Börsen-Zeitung on 5 December 1937, “about whether our politics is right or wrong; but we often think long and hard about whether the arguments we put forward are right and compelling enough for our political purposes. Once we have set a political course, we never depart from that line. But if we see that a policy we deem right has not sufficiently taken root in the people, then we make sure we improve the arguments that speak in its favour.”³⁵ A method applied on a large and small scale. Initially, in order to underpin its anti-church political propaganda, the National Socialist regime maintained that the churches were sowing the seeds of confessional discord; now that the churches have united to form a defensive front, the sole aim of propaganda in the interests of anti-church policy is once again to incite the confessions against each other. In an article in the Nationalsozialistischen Monatshefte of July 1937 dedicated to the Oxford Conference of World Churches, the Protestant churches are urged, finally to recognize the danger posed by the Catholic church.³⁶ Each phase of the struggle calls for a change of position. Josef Grohé,^* Gauleiter and state councillor in Cologne, writing in the Westdeutschen Beobachter,³⁷ has no scruples in restoring to Charlemagne—whom the propaganda has liked to dub “Saxon butcher”—the epithet of Greatness because it is useful at this moment to denounce the Aachen Pilgrimage of 1937 as a political demonstration and let Emperor Charles the Great appear as the true head of Christendom.³⁸ Indeed, not content with constantly changing its fixations, propaganda takes each fixation and extracts from it further contrasting meanings. Depending upon whether security needs are used to justify French or German armament, they are one minute decried as the contemptible product of bourgeois fear, the next hailed as the expression of a peaceful nation’s will for self-preservation.

But even assuming the impossible, namely, that societal reality is inherently without contradiction and that the totalitarian regime need not therefore abandon a single item of propaganda content in the course of its own unfolding, even then propaganda (inasmuch as it sets the contents) would still not have won the game. For, since the will to power, which the dictatorships repress, stems from a nihilistic sensibility {Gesinnung}, it must in its realization become embroiled in antinomies. The will to power strives for total rule and represents nothingness {das Nichts}: the consequence of this is that it comes into conflict with its own totalizing claims. In the interest of power per se, Fascism and National Socialism have to suppress the spontaneity of the mind {geistig} which, if given free rein, exposes the illusion that sustains them both; and yet, without lifting the controls on this spontaneity, they cannot achieve power per se. An intractable dilemma: the dictatorships lay claim to absolute power, the very pursuance of which would call precisely their power into question. Thus, nihilism, if it enters the world, is taken to the point of absurdity; like the devil of Grimms’ fairy tale swindled by the crafty farmer.^*

In all areas of spontaneity of the mind {geistig}, the totalitarian dictatorship is thwarted by its own imperialism. In the interests of power, National Socialism endeavours to throttle religious freedoms completely; but for these very same interests, it must recognize them. If the churches are not tolerated, National Socialism calls into play spiritual {geistig} resistance, which cannot be overcome—at least not through propaganda. If, on the other hand, the churches are left unhindered, then National Socialism might gain their support, but be obliged to endure the withdrawal from its influence of a spiritual-intellectual {geistig} sphere capable of shattering the pseudo-reality at any time. This conflict is all the more intractable since its only possible removal would consist in the regime as it were absorbing the churches—a solution ruled out by its own irrationality. Hence the ambivalence of National Socialist church policy, its fluctuations clearly carrying over into propaganda. All that remains is for the regime to resort to compromise, though this compromises the absoluteness of power. In the domain of art, as in culture in general, the same antinomy has a disruptive effect. On the basis of the principle of totality, the dictatorships must prescribe the direction of artistic and cultural works; if, however, these become a variable of pure power, then the preconditions for their emergence no longer apply and they can at best be considered achievements within the pseudo-reality. Controlled art is wooden iron {Gesteuerte Kunst ist hölzernes Eisen}. “This general mobilization of art and the artistic powers of the nation for the benefit of the Volk,” remarks Wernert, “has a weakness. This is not lost on the men of the hour. They have seen that there was an antinomy between the duties imposed on the artist and the freedom essential to any creative work of art worthy of the name. They have tried to find a solution, mainly simply by contesting that such an antimony existed.”³⁹ Goebbels himself recognises the antinomy in order to repudiate it. “If liberalism started out from the individual and positioned the single human being at the centre of all things,” he declares, “then we have replaced individual with Volk and single human beings with Gemeinschaft.” Goebbels is speaking to filmmakers at the opening of the Chamber of Culture {Reichskulturkammer} on November 15, 1933, and his words chime with his other explanations cited above: “And, of course, the freedom of the individual had to be limited inasmuch as it conflicted with or contradicted the freedom of the nation. This is not a restriction of the concept of freedom per se. Exaggerating the freedom of the individual means jeopardizing or even seriously endangering the freedom of the Volk. Thus, the limits of the concept of individual freedom abut upon those of the freedom of the Volk.”⁴⁰ Since, in the meantime, the regime is not so much limiting individual freedom as abolishing it altogether—not in the interests of the freedom of the Volk, but for the sake of the National Socialist power apparatus, this argumentation merely glosses over the conflict rather than eliminating it. The antithesis coined by Goebbels in 1932 follows the same line: “Culture is there to serve the soul of the Volk, not poison it.”⁴¹ But culture is one with the life process of the Volk, and by contemplating the possibility that the soul could be poisoned by culture, Goebbels announces unequivocally that he understands culture as various pseudo-cultural events serving to uphold the National Socialist fiction of the Volk. What is more, belittling artistic and cultural life, as is the wont of the dictatorships, strikingly confirms the sense that the conflict between the claims of the mind {Geist} and those of power per se cannot be resolved. More ominously for power itself, this conflict comes to a head in the sphere of knowledge. Imbued with the significant conviction that freedom of scientific inquiry and totalitarian propaganda are mutually exclusive, the dictatorships do everything to bring schools and universities into line. Speaking at the assembly of the National Socialist Teachers’ Federation [Nationalsozialistischer Lehrerbund, NSLB] in Frankfurt on 5 August 1934,^* Reichsamtsleiter and State Minister Schemm^† assures his audience that “in Germany’s educational life today, there is no schoolwork and no science, no English, French or Greek, no mathematics, geography and no history that is not focused on a single goal, and that is Germany and its future.”⁴² The more divergences appear in the content of propaganda, the more the regime has to fear from spontaneous acts of knowledge; the pressure on science must therefore increase steadily over time. Only at a relatively late stage of the development is an agreement reached between Reichsminister Rust^* of the Ministry for Science, Education, and Teaching {Reichsminister für Wissenschaft, Erziehung, und Unterricht} and Reichsleiter Bouhler, chair of the Official Party Inspection Commission for the Protection of National Socialist Literature {Parteiamtliche Prüfungskommission zum Schutze des nationalsozialistischen Schrifttums} to ensure the supervision of science in such a way that amounts to its total prescription.^† The official rationale is that experience has shown the necessity of bringing scientific literature—as far as it deals with, or touches upon, questions of political worldview—broadly into line with National Socialist literature policy.⁴³ However, by gaining power over science, the totalitarian regime loses power itself, since scientific enquiry is bound to waste away if it cannot move freely and its decline will in turn limit the perfecting of the power apparatus desired by the regime. Already today, the military is openly critical of the training of new recruits; the latter leave much to be desired—not only in the humanities, but also in technical subjects. And so it even comes about that an official voice sometimes speaks out in favour of science; this means that propaganda begins to waver between the implementation and the suppression of its own totalitarian claims. As in its dealings with the churches, so too with science: the regime is reliant on compromise.

The continuing development of the totalitarian system therefore brings with it the dynamization of the contents of propaganda. Everywhere there are divergences demanding to be suppressed, vulnerable positions crying out to be covered, so that the task of propaganda visibly becomes nothing more than ordering ad hoc mobilizations of motifs and montages of ideas hither and thither like squadrons. During the mass trials of Catholic priests, it is noted that the charges of immorality are not firing up the public enough and immediately the emphasis is shifted to the accusation of treason.^* Women in the workforce were once frowned upon, but a shortage of labor to keep pace with armament makes it necessary to resort to them again and promptly assert that homage has never been paid to any “Gretchen ideal” of German women. A shifting of convictions which gathers pace inexorably. For one thing, the formation of the pseudo-reality does not master the actual societal reality, but instead transforms it into a confused mishmash of conflicting interests and needs; for another, the antinomies in which the nihilistic will to power embroils itself become ever more apparent. The image presented by propaganda moves closer and closer to the fencer in the fairy tale who brandishes his sword with lightning speed to fend off raindrops.^† The reproach levelled at science by National Socialism—that it professes unbridled relativism—can therefore more rightly be aimed at fully-fledged totalitarian propaganda itself. The result is that propaganda, inasmuch as it sets certain contents, must wear out. The totalitarian mobilization of convictions leads to the total liquidation of them all. The degree to which these are devalued emerges in the section Silone appends to his description detailed above of the radio transmission of a Mussolini speech: “Discussion is impossible for Fascism.”⁴⁴

IV.

The wearing out of the contents of propaganda by no means spells the end for totalitarian propaganda overall. Due to the increasing frequency of contradictions between the acts of the regime, between its acts and the assertions {Setzungen} of its propaganda, and between these assertions themselves, the convictions promulgated by propaganda have worn so thin that they no longer serve to uphold the pseudo-reality—and this despite the unbridled implementation of terror and the artificial creation of the masses. In response, the propaganda changes direction, plotting a course which will allow it to hold on to the masses after all. Unable to sustain an effect by means of particular contents, propaganda withdraws from those contents. Material propaganda turns into formal propaganda; the onus is not on the content, but on the manner of its presentation. The movement itself must become the substance—this goes for National Socialism as well as for Fascism. According to a statement by Krieck, cited above,45 National Socialist agitators do not entice with intellectual proofs and arguments, but rather seduce with the “primordial energy of rhythm.”⁴⁶ In fact, rhythmic formations gain the upper hand as, and to the extent that, the swarm of previous promises loses its value. Shocks are orchestrated in random material to prevent any respite from the tension; waves of propaganda are sent out and, as required, either build steadily or swiftly ebb away; and, in all cases, care is taken to coordinate tempi to good effect. These occurrences are lent propagandist significance by the rhythmic quality of the course they take: the skillful sequencing of quiet and action, of push and pull. If the proclamation of content, of substantive and attractive goals, was once decisive, now the appeal to the psycho-physical state associated with the pseudo-reality is predominantly through form—the form in which the propaganda accomplishes the requisite acts and resolutions. The further this process advances, the more the nihilism with which the propaganda handles all convictions reveals itself, of course, and the more undisguised is the eruption of the will to power, whose product is propaganda. Still, the “primordial energy of rhythm” could hardly provide lasting compensation for the destruction of the contents of propaganda if the propaganda didn’t also succeed in making people forget about its own vacuity by stamping the now transparent will to power as the content itself. Whilst, at the beginning of their careers and in the interests of propaganda, National Socialism and Fascism must conceal that they seek nothing but power, they are now, inversely, likewise in the interests of propaganda, obliged to make power per se appear as the epitome of all that is desirable. The impulse to power, which engenders the totalitarian movements and drives them to monopoly capitalism, not only becomes manifest in this phase of development, but also and of necessity assumes the function of its devalued masquerades. The idea of class equality has vanished; what remains is the notion of the abundance of power as the central propagandist motif. In accordance with this theoretical conclusion, Heiden remarks: “If the strength of the dictatorship essentially consisted from its inception in the agreement of wide strata of the Volk and in the resignation of equally wide strata, then by the beginning of 1937 its strength consists in sheer power and in the absence of actual political opinion.”⁴⁷ “Domination for its own sake,” he also writes, “is the content of the dictatorship. Where the latter appears to engage in argumentation, persuasion, even logic, it is only ever an attempt to bolster domination by ostensibly intellectual means. […] The power of persuasion at their rallies flows, not from the conclusiveness of what is said, but from the display of their power in having the last word.”⁴⁸ Doubtless, the totalitarian regime uses every opportunity to display its power and, through the suggestive effect of such events, to replace any of its ideational montages which have expired. Just as propaganda uses the aesthetic magic of the well-organized power apparatus, so it also benefits from the sheen of military pomp. It is no coincidence that the army is summoned to all major political events; aircraft and tank parades, as means of publicity, help the lamest argument back onto its feet and still weave a seductive shimmer around nothingness. Such displays may again and again disguise the nihilist nature of the totalitarian claim to power, but they do not present to their masses the creditworthiness which alone would enable that claim to replace the worn-out contents of propaganda. The masses directly subjected to propaganda will at most give credit to the National Socialist and Fascist claim to power if it gains outward recognition. Indeed, nations in the economic situation of Germany and Italy—nations, moreover, whose unification has taken place comparatively recently—will function particularly willingly if such a claim appears to be identical with that of safeguarding and augmenting national standing. Since propaganda is shrinking while National Socialist and Fascist domination is consolidating, and since the shrinking process threatens to cancel out organizational consolidation, striving for imperialist goals is by no means at the discretion of the dictatorships; rather, they would perish along with their propaganda if they did not live out their will to power in the form of expansionism. In the interests of its own continued existence, upon which the existence of the entire regime depends, totalitarian propaganda must give ever greater emphasis to foreign policy.

This is not to say that propaganda hasn’t been working on foreign policy material already from the days of the seizure of power, nor that it would refrain from inflammatory slogans to campaign for the National Socialist and Fascist politics of conquest. Corresponding in propaganda terms to Mussolini’s proletarian nations, Hitler’s words attacking the Bolshevization of Europe do so in the name of race and blood, laying claim to the incorporation of ethnic German minorities. Such assertions {Setzungen} seek to arouse sympathetic masses in the most varied countries and to create a mood of civil war; they indisputably owe a part of their effect to the terror which the dictatorships bring to bear on international public opinion through the extreme escalation of the potential for war. German armament and the second four-year plan are not least acts of world propaganda. “Ultimately,” writes Priester, “the autarkic programme is meant to ease the situation in foreign policy and to move future negotiating partners towards the greatest possible concessions in colonial and trade questions.”⁴⁹ Added to this comes the use of all remaining means of propaganda in the interests of foreign policy: vibrations are sent rippling through the international public, fixating it on promulgated slogans; relentless excitement is created so that the tragic effect of these slogans doesn’t abate. In time, world propaganda undergoes the same process as domestic propaganda. Gradually, in the interests of the dictatorships’ expansionist drive, propaganda must overturn the very watchwords it proclaimed itself because otherwise it would be unable to withstand the heterogenous situations evoked by the independent existence of foreign policy reality. Divergences and contradictions are the consequence. Tactical adaptation? But when the strategic goal is no less than world domination, everything that otherwise counts as substance falls within the sphere of the tactical. The course of Italian foreign policy is reminiscent of a temperature curve. And if National Socialist colonial propaganda believes that momentarily it can achieve nothing with the thesis “people without space” {Volk ohne Raum}, then it foists in its place the argument that what’s needed is more space and more people.^* The propaganda montages are constantly in flux, unless constancy in international relations necessitates their provisional retention. And through both their wearing out and the acts in which they culminate, what reveals itself—ever more unmistakeably—is the imperialism from which they stem. Subsequent to the declaration in the autumn of 1936 that Germany and Italy will not tolerate the establishment of a Bolshevist stronghold in Spain, events take place which conclusively show that the anti-Bolshevism of the dictatorships is not so much the expression of a Platonic ethos but rather represents the propagandist justification of armed intervention. Hitler’s solemn renunciation of all claims to South Tyrol proves unequivocally that the dogma of all Germans belonging to the people as a whole {Volksganze} is only intended to camouflage the National Socialist will to conquer. Dogma is toppled, imperialism remains. Gradually world propaganda assumes a formal character; in any case it increasingly burdens the necessity or the fact of the increase in power per se. Hitler’s Königsberg address, calling the people to the first greater German plebiscite on 10 April 1938, ends with: “On this day I will be the Führer of the greatest army in world history because when, on this 10th day of April, I place my ballot in the ballot box, I know: Behind me come 50 million, all of whom know only my rallying cry: One people and one Reich, Germany!”⁵⁰

Although these words invariably exploit associations with the conquest of former German territories, the emphasis is quite clearly more on winning power. Portraying the electorate as the greatest army of world history is a singularly striking admission that National Socialism consists entirely in striving for the greatest possible power apparatus. But the use of such an image at these outstanding moments also betrays that undisguised imperialism is in fact becoming the decisive propaganda content. Totalitarian propaganda has no other choice: it must live on conquests, but it is dying. Its art consists now more in supplying renewed energy with the injection of imperialist motifs. War has been described as the recourse of dictatorships which fail internally. But war is an extreme case and, in the event of difficulties at home, at least the totalitarian regime has many propagandist tools of a foreign policy nature at its disposal; though it may push on towards war all the same and war may be its ultima ratio. Through the rhythmic gradations of its acts and resolutions, world propaganda can offset the loss of tension due to the decline hitherto of domestic propaganda, and, if psycho-physical upheaval is called for, is never at a loss for ways to trigger shocks; not to mention that the slightest increase in external prestige contributes to strengthening the pseudo-reality, in which nothing appears quite as real as prestige itself. To be sure, the National Socialist colonial program provides for a string of functions which initially don’t even concern the colonies. By shifting imperialism into the centre, the dictatorships not only find a replacement in the shape of world propaganda for home propaganda as it expires, but also directly fan the flames of the latter; for, as has been seen, an expansionist politics needs extensive propagandist preparations within the sphere of influence {Machtbereich} of the dictatorships themselves. In the end, world and domestic propaganda interlock so tightly that every foreign policy action at the same time satisfies inner propaganda needs and every domestic action seeks to serve the purposes of outward-looking propaganda. Fully corresponding totalitarian propaganda is of necessity propaganda on a world scale.

Looking at the play of this propaganda: blindly it whirls and swirls everything that appears fixed, since only by distorting and confusing the contents which it unleashed is it able to achieve total influence over opinion, the realization of which is a condition of its total claim to power. In the first phase, totalitarian propaganda becomes a technique for exciting the masses, no matter what methods are used. Up is down and down is up. Instead of ideologically transfiguring its colonial demands according to familiar patterns, National Socialist propaganda is in the habit of accounting for these demands with overt reference to economic interests. It says calico and means God^*—the God who inspires Mussolini’s vision of the Mediterranean and Hitler’s campaign to the southeast. Behind the tumult of totalitarian propaganda, a death’s-head appears.⁵¹

Translated by Bernadette Boyle and Graeme Gilloch

NOTES

1.   1.    [Joseph Goebbels, Revolution der Deutschen (Oldenburg: Stalling, 1933), 140.]

2.   2.    [Joseph Goebbels, statement to the press on the establishment of the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in Berlin, March 3, 1933, quoted in Deutsche Geschichte 1933–1945: Dokumente zur Innen- und Außenpolitik, ed. Wolfgang Michalka (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1992), 78f.]

3.   3.    [Goebbels, Revolution der Deutschen, 136.]

4.   4.    [Konrad Heiden, Adolf Hitler, vol. 2 (Zürich: Europa Verlag, 1937), 133.]

5.   5.    [Ignazio Silone, Der Fascismus: Seine Entstehung und seine Entwicklung (Zürich: Europa Verlag, 1934), 179.]

6.   6.    [Hans Frank, Nationalsozialistisches Handbuch für Recht und Gesetzgebung, 2nd ed. (Munich: F. Eher, 1935), 13.]

7.   7.    [Ernst Rudolf Huber, Verfassungsrecht des Grossdeutschen Reiches (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1939), 360.]

8.   8.    [Huber, Verfassungsrecht, 360.]

9.   9.    [Silone, Der Fascismus, 271.]

10. 10.    [Silone, 271.]

11. 11.    {Kracauer refers here to a passage in section E of this essay, which can be found here: Siegfried Kracauer, Werke in neun Bänden, vol. 2.2, Studien zu Massenmedien und Propaganda, ed. Christian Fleck and Bernd Stiegler (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2012), 81.}

12. 12.    [Angelica Balabanoff, Wesen und Werdegang des italienischen Faschismus (Vienna: Hess/Verlag, 1931), 62.]

13. 13.    [Robert Ley at the German Labor Front rally in Berlin to mark the founding of the culture and leisure organization Kraft durch Freude (KdF) on November 27, 1933, quoted in Der nationalsozialistische Staat, ed. Walther Gehl (Breslau: Hirt, 1933/34), 90.]

14. 14.    [Robert Ley, Durchbruch der sozialen Ehre (Berlin: Mehden-Verlag, 1937), 34.]

15. 15.    [Ley, Durchbruch, 34.]

16. 16.    [Ley, 43.]

17. 17.    [Erich Wernert, L’art dans le IIIe Reich (Paris: Paul Hartmann, 1936), 112.]

18. 18.    [Goebbels, Revolution der Deutschen, 119.]

19. 19.    [This statement from Heinrich Schöne is found only in Willi Münzenberg, Propaganda als Waffe (Paris: Éditions du Carrefour, 1937), 273.]

20. 20.    [Silone, Der Fascismus, 266.]

21. 21.    [Heiden, Adolf Hitler, vol. 2, 212.]

22. 22.    [Joseph Goebbels, Kampf um Berlin, vol. 1 (Munich: F. Eher, 1935), 91.]

23. 23.    [Hans Erich Priester, Das deutsche Wirtschaftswunder (Amsterdam: Querido, 1936), 269.]

24. 24.    [Priester, Das deutsche Wirtschaftswunder, 323.]

25. 25.    [Silone, Der Fascismus, 204.]

26. 26.    [Max Domarus, ed., Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, Vol. 1: 1932–1945 (Vienna: Löwit, 1973), 367.]

27. 27.    [Heiden, Adolf Hitler, vol. 2, 150.]

28. 28.    [Silone, Der Fascismus, 175.]

29. 29.    [Joseph Goebbels, rally in Berlin Sports Palace, May 11, 1934, quoted in Deutsches Reich 1933–1937, Vol. 1: Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland, 1933–1945 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008), 337.]

30. 30.    [Joseph Goebbels, speech at party rally, Essen, June 25, 1934, quoted in Gehl, ed., Der nationalsozialistische Staat, 73.]

31. 31.    [Benedict Schmittmann, “Das Mittelstandsproblem im Dritten Reich,” in Rosi Karfiol, Mittelstandsprobleme, vol. 4, Kölner Sozialpolitische Studien, ed. Benedict Schmittmann (Cologne: Reich und Heimat Verlag, 1934), 123.]

32. 32.    [Gottfried Feder, writing in the Völkische Beobachter, January 4, 1934, quoted in Gehl, ed., Der nationalsozialistische Staat, 74–76, 75.]

33. 33.    Kulturkampf: Berichte aus dem Dritten Reich, no. 75, November 29, 1937.

34. 34.    Kulturkampf, no. 74, November 18, 1937.

35. 35.    Kulturkampf, no. 76, December 8, 1937. [Goebbels in an interview for the Berliner Börsenzeitung, December 5, 1937.]

36. 36.    Kulturkampf, no. 62, July 19, 1937.

37. 37.    [Josef Grohé, “Zur Aachner Heiligtumsfahrt,” Westdeutscher Beobachter, July 24, 1937.]

38. 38.    Kulturkampf, no. 63, July 28, 1937.

39. 39.    [Wernert, L’art dans le IIIe Reich, 31f.]

40. 40.    [Joseph Goebbels, speech on the opening of the Reich Chamber of Culture in Berlin, November 15, 1933, quoted in Helmut Heiber, ed., Goebbels-Reden, Vol.1: 1932–1939 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1971), 133–141, 134.]

41. 41.    [Goebbels, Revolution der Deutschen, 120.]

42. 42.    [NSDAP/Nationalsozialistischer Lehrerbund, ed., Hans Schemm spricht: Seine Reden und sein Werk (Gauverlag Bayerische Ostmark, 1941), 223.]

43. 43.    Cf. Kulturkampf, no. 62, July 19, 1937.

44. 44.    [Reference cannot be determined with certainty.]

45. 45.    [Kracauer, Werke, 2.2, 103.] {TP, 91.}

46. 46.    [Ernst Krieck, Nationalpolitische Erziehung (Leipzig: Armanen-Verlag, 1937), 38.]

47. 47.    [Heiden, Adolf Hitler, vol. 2, 148.]

48. 48.    [Heiden, 62.]

49. 49.    [Priester, Das deutsche Wirtschaftswunder, 269.]

50. 50.    [Adolf Hitler, speech in Königsberg, March 25, 1938, proclaiming Reichstag election on April 10, 1938, quoted in Domarus, ed., Hitler, 837. Kracauer also cites Berliner Tageblatt of March 27, 1938, nos. 145–46.]

51. 51.    [Kracauer, Werke 2.2, 17.] {TP, 11.}

---

1. * {The Surhkamp editors include the correct citation from Hans Frank: “Alles, was dem Volk nützt, ist Recht; alles was ihm schadet, ist Unrecht”: “All that is beneficial to the people is right and lawful, all that harms them is unlawful.” The term “Recht” can be translated as “right,” as “just,” and as “law”/“lawful.”}

2. * Alfredo Rocco (1875–1935) was a professor of commercial and economic law at a number of Italian universities prior to becoming justice minister (1925–1932). At one time a Marxist thinker, he later joined the Fascist movement, which adapted his notion of corporatism, according to which the state should intervene to mediate and harmonize otherwise conflictual class relations.}

3. * {Between 1933 and the outbreak of war in 1939, and starting with completion of a stretch between Frankfurt and Darmstadt, 3300 km of the German Autobahn system were constructed, a program continued as of 1940, using forced labor. In Italy, work to drain the Pontine Marshes southeast of Rome was abandoned in 1914 and then resumed under Mussolini’s regime in 1930. Serving as a work creation scheme and photo opportunity, the project led to the drainage of 775 square km in a ten-year period though subsequent attempts to settle and utilize the land proved largely unsuccessful. The notion of a “Potemkin village” is a reference to the creation of fake or simulated scenery and villages in the newly conquered Crimea by its governor, Grigory Potemkin (1739–1791), during the reign of Catherine II.}

4. † {Born in Chernihiv in the Russian Empire, Angelica Balabanoff (1878–1965) was a Jewish Russian communist activist in Rome who, after spending time in Russia and breaking with the Bolshevik movement in 1922, returned to Italy and worked as a journalist. With the rise of Fascism, she went into exile firstly in Switzerland and then in the United States. After the war, she resumed working for the cause of socialism in Italy until her death in Rome at the age of eighty-seven.}

5. * {This served to cement a hierarchical relationship between employer and employee rather than an equal reciprocal contractual arrangement.}

6. † {The KdF was established in November 1933 under the auspices of the German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, DAF) and encompassed not only a wide range of recreational, sporting, and cultural activities, including mass tourism, but also various workplace improvements (e.g., the construction of modern canteens and washrooms). Its mission was essentially twofold: to boost industrial production, and to facilitate the integration of the workforce into the Volksgemeinschaft.}

7. ‡ {The Dopolavoro (OND) was the Fascist Italian equivalent of the KdF.}

8. § {A member of the Nazi Party since 1925, Robert Ley (1890–1945) was leader of the DAF in the period 1933–1945. He committed suicide while awaiting trial for war crimes at Nuremburg. Kracauer provides no details of the source of these quotations.}

9. * {Designed by Albert Speer and Walter Brugmann, the foundation stone for this edifice was laid in 1935 but the building itself was never completed. It was part of a complex of sites in Nuremberg where the Nazi Party staged its rallies and events from 1933 to 1938.}

10. * {Heinrich Schöne (1889–1945) joined the National Socialist movement in 1924 and the SA in 1925. Leader of the Hitler Youth movement (1926–1927) he rose to hold senior positions in the SA and became a leading Nazi politician and official. He was killed on the Russian front.}

11. * {Han Erich Priester (life dates unknown) was a journalist and commentator on economic affairs. He wrote critically on the German banking crisis of 1931 and in 1936 described what he saw as the success of National Socialist policies in eliminating unemployment.}

12. † {Announced at the party conference in 1936, this centered on the swift rearmament of Germany and preparations for what was seen as an inevitable war with Russia. Hermann Göring was commissioned to lead this program, which involved the reorientation of German businesses and industries away from consumer goods and toward military equipment.}

13. * {Giacomo Matteotti (1885–1924) was a socialist politician who warned of the threat of Fascism and, in a speech on May 30, 1924, denounced Fascist violence and fraud in the recent elections. He was abducted eleven days later and murdered. Among those arrested and convicted of this killing was Amerigo Dumini, a member of the Fascist secret police. This murder led to a temporary decline in support for the Fascists. Mussolini’s involvement is still much debated. He accepted some responsibility for the killing in a speech in early 1925 but did not admit any direct link with the events. The crisis was a turning point in Mussolini’s politics: from then on, his apparent efforts to work with parliamentary institutions gave way to a much more dictatorial approach. The threat that provincial Fascists might trigger civil war strengthened Mussolini’s position in his dealings with the Italian monarchy, setting himself up as a guarantor of national stability.}

14. * {Material shortages and high unemployment in Germany compounded internal strife in the National Socialist party itself, with the leader of the SA, Ernst Röhm seeking to seeking to increase his own power and that of the SA vis-à-vis the Gestapo and SS. In what became known as the “Röhm Putsch,” Hitler had Röhm and other leading figures in the SA, some two hundred in total, arrested and summarily executed. Around one hundred other opponents met a similar fate. Hitler sought to persuade the populace that this was necessary action against corruption. Retrospectively, these extrajudicial actions were legalized by the ruling cabinet and legitimized by Carl Schmitt.}

15. † {The rally actually took place on May 11, 1934. The “moaners” dismissed by Goebbels, according to an article of May 13–14, 1934, in the Völkischer Beobachter, were, typically, critics of the regime, Jews, and the foreign press.}

16. ‡ {Benedict Schmittmann (1872–1939) was a Catholic social scientist, academic, and political figure calling for federalist reforms of the German Reich. He was arrested in 1933 and prohibited from teaching. Declining to emigrate, he was arrested again in 1939 and died of the effects of ill treatment in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.}

17. * {This weekly newspaper was first published in March 1936 and was required reading for members of the SS. The print run increased from an initial 70,000 to approximately 750,000 by 1944, making it the second largest political weekly of the Third Reich.}

18. * {Josef Grohé (1902–1987) joined the National Socialist Party in 1922 and held various offices and positions in and around his native Cologne. In 1928 he was imprisoned for hate speech in an article for the Westdeutscher Beobachter. He served as a functionary within the party up until 1945. After the war, and a four-and-a-half-year prison sentence, he worked in the toy industry.}

19. * {The reference here is to the tale “The Peasant and the Devil” (“Der Bauer und der Teufel”) in which a cunning farmer twice outwits the Devil.}

20. * {This association of National Socialist teachers grew enormously following the 1933 seizure of power (from approximately 12,000 to 250,000 members). However, its influence on educational policy remained limited.}

21. † {Hans Schemm (1891–1935) was a teacher in Bayreuth and joined the party in 1923. In 1928 he was elected to the Bavarian Assembly (Landtag) and founded the NSLB in 1929. Involved in numerous publications, including setting up a newspaper, he joined the SA and became Bavarian minister of culture in 1933. He was killed in a plane crash.}

22. * {Bernhard Rust (1883–1945) joined the National Socialist Party in 1925 and, after losing his teaching position in 1930, entered politics. He oversaw the dismissal of thousands of teachers and academics on account of their political views and backgrounds. He sought to integrate Nazi ideology into the curriculum. His influence waned after 1936. He committed suicide on the day of the German capitulation.}

23. † {Philipp Bouhler (1899–1945) worked on the Völkischer Beobachter from 1921 and joined the National Socialist Party in 1922. He became a leading Nazi functionary and in 1933 achieved the position of Reichsleiter, the second highest rank in the party. A key figure in Hitler’s central office, he was given oversight of cultural affairs and became chair of the Official Party Inspection Commission for the Protection of National Socialist Literature. From 1939, with Karl Brandt, he planned and coordinated the Aktion T4 program involving the mass killing of disabled people and psychiatric patients and the “special treatment” (Sonderbehandlung) program of mass murder in the concentration camps. He committed suicide after his arrest in 1945.}

24. * {The persecution of (mainly Catholic) clergy, accusing them of homosexuality, began in earnest in 1935 and reached its high point in 1938, when several thousand priests and other religious figures were condemned in show trials.}

25. † {A reference to Grimms’ fairy tale “The Three Brothers.”}

26. * {Originally the title of a 1926 Hans Grimm novel, this became a key slogan of National Socialist propaganda and part of their manifesto.}

27. * {In section A of the manuscript, Kracauer approximates Theodor Fontane’s comment: “When they, the English say Christ, and mean cotton.”}